Cooking for Partees, part deux

Cooking with 'gas', in the form of panadol and gin/tonic

So I cooked a crapload of food on the weekend. I am traditionally not a baker, but rather, a thrower-together of foods for dinner, and sometimes, a recipe follower. Of foods that can or should be consumed as a meal, that is. I generally avoid things that need to be measured. So my baking was a bigger enterprise than I anticipated because it turns out all that measuring requires a rather large assortment of stuff. Things you need if you are going to bake a clafoutis, some cup cakes, and some ginger bread:
1) a tray that fits in your oven
2) cookie cutters (these are an ARSE to do cutting with). Really incredibly time consuming bizzo. And still looked basically absurd, and not at all like a baby's hand and train, as was intended. In fact, it looked like it was made by a baby. But it was couched in a lot of celophane, so okay mostly
3) a rolling pin. Really, this felt like it was taking things up quite a few notches but I used it a few times
4) some form of blender/mixer. Because hand whisking the eggs really made my husband impossibly grumpy

However, in general the cooking was quite fun, and accompanied by lots of exclamations from said husband, mostly on the subject of how shocking it was that I was this kind of person. Actually, I was feeling pretty smug about being This Kind of Person, even if it was news to me that baking soda and powder were different things, and even if I did give up and roll out my pastry and gingerbread with the sticky glue from the label on the cheap rolling pin still semi-attached.

I figure I'm only about 24 steps away from having competitive dinner parties with exotic mushrooms served in shot glasses as cold soup (this is really happening in the lives of my older colleagues. She even admitted that it was competitive cooking.)



Because I am a substandard baker I get all my recipes from the internet. Sometimes this means you have to get things that are super-common in the US but ridiculous to get here. Like unsulphured molasses. When I asked for molasses at the supermarket they took me to the mussels.



Because I'm watching The Renovators I'm going to call these 'the heroes of the room'. But actually, I mostly am thinking, looking at them again, that they look a hell of a lot more lurid than Nigella's do. Less red velvet and more red psychadellic.