Tag: baking

No Recipe for Life

~ Swisa A ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes it’s the simplest things in life that can boost for your soul or simply make you happy.   Simple things like cooking or baking.  Ever since I was 5 or 6 years old I’ve been baking and cooking up dishes in the kitchen with my picture cookbook (which I got from one of my best friends and still use till today. Thank you!).  Some dishes turned out well, some turned out funny, some turned out to be something else, but overall it turned out to be a generally good experience that can teach one a bit about life.

It is the experience of cooking or baking that counts despite the sometimes failed attempts.  Thirty years on my parents seem to recall perfectly my initial attempts at making brownies that turned out to be little black squares of rock-like substance that seems to have been part of a volcanic eruption or how my “Eggy” bread” gave everyone a good laugh.  My husband reminds me of how my cookies turned out to be scones or how cakes turn out to be bread.

What ever happens in the kitchen though can be a little reminder of life in general.   There is no one recipe that fits everyone.  Whilst the recipe might work for some, for others it might require tweaking, changes in measurements, or need techniques to get the desired outcome.  The outcome depends upon the ingredients, the sequence in which they were combined or how fast they were mixed.  Even things such as humidity (which are hard to control) play a big role.  The trick though, is to keep finding out why it worked (or didn’t work) and to keep working on it.

That too is life.  There’s no perfect recipe.  You may spend your life trying to do everything “right” but in the end, we are all human.  There are good days, bad days and days you wish you could just stay in bed all day.  Life is all about the experience; finding the recipe, getting the ingredients, imagining the desired outcome and finally seeing the ingredients come to life step by step.  I love the thrill of seeing the outcome.

Sometimes it turns out well, sometimes it doesn’t.  Don’t worry when things don’t go the way you want it.  Don’t worry when you find yourself out of some ingredients.  Improvise and find an alternative.  Figure out why it didn’t work and try again.  If you don’t try, you’ll never get it right.

Happy Baking (or Cooking)!

The Bread Machine

~ Swisa A ~ Leave a comment

The weekend is always dangerous. It’s especially dangerous when I find myself in the electronics section or in the kitchen appliances area. If I am in the Apple Store too long, I get tempted by the iPad 2, the MacBook Air or even the little accessories. Suddenly my iPhone feels like it needs a couple more accessories. (I already have three brand new cases waiting to be used. I’m stocking up for when iPhone 3GS cases become hard to find… :P) At the moment, the universal dock is tempting. I can charge my phone on it at night without taking up space on my bedside table and it’ll look pretty on its stand..hmm

In the kitchen appliances area, I’m drawn by all the baking materials. Yes, I enjoy being a girl and cooking although I am also a working woman. I enjoy cooking. For me its like I get to go on a little vacation and create a few things. A stir here and there, pop it in the oven and suddenly you get a new creation. At the same time, it’s also relaxing and gets your mind off things. Yes, my house is full of cooking books, and machines of all sorts. We have the yogurt maker, crepe machine, fondue set, all sorts of baking trays and cake pans. The house is overloaded with cooking materials, utensils and all sorts of machines. This past weekend’s newest addition is the bread machine.

Of course nothing beats making bread the traditional way by hand, but with so many things to do nowadays the machines are always so tempting. Here, I can just pop the ingredients into the machine and roughly three hours later, I’ll have fresh bread. How absolutely wonderful. I can use it to make pizza dough or just bread dough so that I can take it out to put in stuffings. I can make fruit breads, carrot bread, or any kind of bread. All this, without getting my hands dirty. This is exciting stuff.

I can even pre-programme the machine so that it starts later on at night. This way I can wake up to the fresh smell of bread. Ahh…what I good dream. Tonight I’m trying it out. Lets see what the results are like. So far the dough looks promising and thinking about it is giving me little bursts of joy. I’ll have fresh bread soon!

Although I love all these machines and gadgets, I have to admit that I wonder if one day I will be overwhelmed with all these machines. What do we do with all the unused items? What will this earth do with them? I still have my Palm V since the days when PDAs were the chick thing to have. The younger generation no longer know what it is. It still works wonderfully but it is mostly left to sleep in my drawer. I could throw it away, but it’s such a pity to throw something so good away. So what do you do with all your unused gadgets? Do you recycle them or keep them? What do you think?

Not to forget my bread machine, if you have a bread machine, how do you like it? 🙂 Do you have any good recipes to share?