Foooood... and books

I made lasagna tonight. Other than being a little crunchy on the top, I’d call it a success. I simultaneously love and hate cooking. I really like to bake and I’ve reached a relative level of comfort with that, but for some reason cooking still causes me some bizarre unfounded anxiety. I enjoy the results though. And hopefully if I continue, I’ll become more comfortable with it and then bye-bye cooking anxiety!

… I can dream.

It also helps that there are lots of recipes I want to try. I find them everywhere, from the packaging of various products, to blogs, to books(!). Some of the books I’ve read in the past have really great looking recipes interspersed within the stories. A lot of those recipes come from colorful family backgrounds and work to bring a sort of authenticating feel to various memoirs (or what I have now become accustomed to calling Life Writing).

I also have a bunch of cookbooks I should really peruse. Every once in a while I get a vegetarian cookbook and go through it and mark things I want to make. Usually things end about there. I’d like to try to take things a little bit further this summer and maybe succeed in making some of the dishes.

Teaching myself to cook is part of my bettering-myself plan for the summer. I kind of have one every summer. Or every season. Or all the time. This summer I’m supposed to be relaxing. No one seems to realize how stressful not stressing out is for me. So anyway, in between relaxing and stressing about relaxing I will be reading, taking my Chinese course, and working (assuming I get a job. I need a job. Badly. I am B-R-O-K-E), but I will also try to cook/bake more, be more active (gotta get into rugby shape!), devote more time to arts and crafts, and sleep. And update the blog, of course. AND (and yes, I know I already said it, but it’s important) read. I will be reading a lot this summer. I always do, but I need to start figuring out what I want to write my thesis on, and the best way I can figure out how to do that is by reading, so that is what I intend to do.