Well, what are you cooking? Bonus points for game-themed dishes!
I had the day off work today and I have finally managed to get hold of some flour, so I decided to do some baking.
Welsh cakes:
Bread of undetermined density (possibly could be used as a house brick):
We have acquired The Curry Guy cookbook as the kids are hankering after a takeaway. We’ve spent a fortune on spices but the results are excellent.
@Whistle_Pig those Welsh Cakes look fantastic
@Captbnut it’s amazing how much better a curry can be when you use spices instead of sauce from a jar!
(the Welsh cakes are pretty good, even if I do say so myself 
. When we’ve finished this batch I’m going to make some with chocolate chips instead of sultanas)
@GeeBizzle that sourdough loaf looks pretty good. I’m just in the middle of making one now, which I hope will be an improvement on my previous efforts…
Wild garlic and cheese scones. Immense if I do say so myself. Had them with homemade parsnip soup for lunch - delicious!
Recipe? 
Did you forage the garlic?
I love to cook. I’m mostly doing (tasty) diet stuff at the moment, but here’s a couple of recent things
Chicken Biryani - this is a real go-to for me, I had it this evening in fact.
This was a recent apple pie.
Living where I do there are a couple of really important things for me to cook. This is traditional Hevva/Heavy cake
And of course, pasties 
yes, I’m from down there.
Tonight I plan to do pork fajitas: strips of pork cooked in olive oil with red onion, red bell pepper, and Anaheim chili pepper, seasoned with ancho chile powder, cumin, a little garlic, and lime juice. Avocado slices on the side.
Due to the ongoing global pandemic I’ve been trying to minimize my grocery trips (that being my only major exposure to other people unless my work decides to reopen the portion of my job that used to involve client contact and was the only bit I needed to be in the office for). Also, my usual approach has been to pick a few recipes and then go get only the ingredients I needed. I can follow recipes pretty well but I’m not a creative or improvisational cook so the ingredient shortages of the early pandemic really made it tough to do what I’m used to. So, between those two things I figured I’d sign up for a meal-kit service. Expensive, yup. Too much packaging, yup. Nothing I couldn’t just do at home under normal circumstances, check. And portions that are too small for my fat self, double check. But, it’s three recipes a week, theoretically two meals worth each, delivered to my doorstep, with all the ingredients required in the amount needed. And under the circumstances, that’s ideal.
So far, Blue Apron has been treating me pretty well. I’m just about done with my fourth week worth, and most of the meals have been delicious and in a lot of cases not stuff I would have made myself ordinarily (for starters, I usually go for one-pot meals because they’re a lot less to juggle). Tonight’s meal, the last of the box, was seared Italian-spiced chicken; couscous with basil pesto, and kale with carrots, currants and garlic, finished with red wine vinegar:
Probably my favorite meal so far, astonishingly, was a salad:
To celebrate and exploit the slight easing of the social restrictions that we have been chafing under, my sister and I invited my nephew and his partner to dinner on Sunday night.
For an hors d’oeuvre, we served crostini with a duck rillettes that Elisabeth had made earlier and dill pickles that I had tarted up to my secret Polish recipe. I made spaceflights to go with it, a cocktail of my own composition somewhere between an aviation and a blue moon.
Then we had a leg of lamb that I had dry-aged for twenty days in a crust of black pepper and coriander seeds, barbecued slowly over charcoal. I served that with ratatouille made with lamb stock and dry sherry; cauliflower and broccoli that I first steamed and then riced with butter and dill tips; and a reduction of lamb stock made of the bones and scraps of a previous leg of lamb, onion, carrot, parsnip, swede (rutabaga), garlic, and parsley. And accompanied it with a 2012 McLaren Vale carbernet-sauvignon.
Then we finished up with blackberries, raspberries, mandarin segments, lemonadefruit segments, plum, and pomegranate arils set in a jelly made of lemonadefruit juice and champagne.
I made an instant pot vegetarian chili tonight that was too spicy for everyone but me. Haha.
Since tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo and Taco Tuesday, I plan to make vegetarian tacos and elote – though using frozen corn. Two of the people I cook for basically don’t have teeth, so corn on the cob is out.
I need to get spices to start making curries. The house is starting to get tired of soup, and curry is something else the Instant Pot does well.
@malkav11 that salad looks delicious!
@Agemegos that looks like the menu at an extremely fancy restaurant. I hope your guests were suitably impressed! Was it as complicated as it sounds to prepare?
My sister is a retired boardroom chef, once known for providing the best lunches in Sydney, and I am a keen amateur. So I dare to say that the meal was of very high quality. And there are things that you can do when you are preparing a fixed menu for a known number of diners at a specific time that are not possible to serve à la carte with twenty minutes’ notice. If I had been trying to impress a gourmet I would have sliced the meat more carefully into neater slices, and I think Elisabeth might have made madeleines to go with the dessert. Possibly we might have added a preliminary bisque and served a botrytis semillon with the sweet. Otherwise I’d say it was a meal that I’d serve anyone except a vegetarian.
Will and Jess are good to cook for: they not only enjoy food but are interested in it, and ask about using or adapting one’s ingredients and techniques. It’s good to be able to discuss what you’ve done on your hobby project with someone who understands what went into it.
I would say that none of the operations involved in making that dinner was difficult, but there were a lot of them, and some of them took patience and care. You could do it all with no great skill, but the detailed instructions would be very long. And some of them would include such phrases as “…for four days” or “… for two weeks”.
I didn’t forage it as it came in a salad box from our grocer but there is plenty of it around here
I would definitely have to write myself a schedule for something like that! It sounds like there was a lot of skill in the choosing and the planning, even if you don’t consider the construction phase to have been very difficult.
Thanks @Griffster77! I don’t think I’ve ever seen wild garlic for sale, which is why I asked if you’d foraged it, but it’s interesting to know that some greengrocers sell it.
My spice shelf has allspice, ancho chile, anise, basil, bay leaves, black pepper, California chile, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, dill seed, five spice powder, garlic powder, ginger, lemon peel, Maharajah curry, marjoram, mint, mustard seed, onion powder, orange peel, oregano, paprika, parsley, red curry, rosemary, saffron, sage, sumac, sweet curry, and thyme. Plus some spices whose containers don’t fit neatly over on the other side, such as chipotle chile, fenugreek, and turmeric. In the long run I’d like to have all the spice containers fit into the same array, but I have to use up the existing spices first.
I’ve italicized the ones I actually use in making curries. Having a bunch of different spices lets me do different mixes for different effects, and not be dependent on Spice House’s ideas of what the ideal flavor blend is (though they don’t do a bad job).
Years ago, I was working on a supplement for GURPS, and as I was getting ready to submit it, my brain short circuited and I deleted the entire text of the manuscript! So I had to recreate the whole thing from memory. But what was notable about this was that writing it had taken me two months, but recreating it took two weeks. That is, about 75% of the work was thinking out what had to go into it, and only 25% was actually putting the words onto the page.
I think cooking is much the same way. The thinking part of it goes back to when you shop, and certainly starts before you get out the first ingredient or utensil. At least that’s true for me, and I’m a more amateurish amateur than Agemegos.
