You've done some fantastic work on your food blog and I always enjoy reading YI's menu choices and selections. Nice to have both of you around.
And it's nice of you to say so. I enjoy reading Fran's blog as well.
Appreciate what YI's saying about techniques and strengths as well. I'm hugely confident in some cuisines and cooking areas, much less so in others. I've never been particularly arsed with desserts or pastry and have very basic abilities there as a result,
Me and all. I'm more a top-of-the-stove man. Ovens, in my world, are mostly for roasting and warming plates.
yet I could butcher and process most animals fairly professionally and quickly.
That's a skill that was very slow in coming, for me. These days, I'm a dab hand at dealing with fowl, bunnies and the like and, with help, I can do my own goats and deer; but the idea of dispatching and carving up a yearling heifer or a market-weight pig scares me to death. In the 1980s, when I was in Lafayette, Louisiana, I attended a
Grand Boucherie de Cochon, a traditional autumn hog-killing, where they kill a pig every hour or so and you get to see how they used to deal with the various parts in the old days. It's an enormous amount of work (and here at home we wouldn't have the beer tent and the live Cajun music to enhance the experience).
I like and admire the way you're methodically trying out new skills and recipes on your blog - it's always easy to settle into a more restricted range.
I've read somplace that the average North American home cook prepares something like ten to twelve meals in rotation. From what I've seen, I'd say that's a generous estimate. I guess it's a live-to-eat versus eat-to-live thing, but I'd hurl myself off a bridge if I were consigned to a culinary repertoir as limited as that.
I'm lucky to have so much unusual produce on my doorstep, which helps keep a lazy arse like me on my toes.
My luck is being so close to the source of what we eat-- knowing, absolutely, the provenance of 90% of our food. The other 10% consists of jars and bottles of stuff from around the world, via ethnic markets in the city, that enable me to turn it into the dishes we love.