Cooking

I enjoy cooking. There is something to be said (or in this written) about making something for yourself. I get a certain pride in ownership when I take various ingredients and create something that will be consumed. Also, it is cheaper to cook then to go out to a restaurant. Now mind you I am not much of a cook and I don't really have an ambition to go down that path. I just finished Kitchen Confidential and I remember my time as a waiter at the Jackson Yacht Club vividly enough to know that a life in the kitchen is not something I want.

In fact I don't even know if what I do can sometimes be considered cooking. I think we can all agree it isn't cooking when you go to McDonald's and pick up an extra value meal. However, there might be a little bit of discussion on if taking out a Stouffer's Lasagna and putting it in the oven is cooking. Or what about buying a pre-marinated chicken breast at a grocery store and cooking that on the grill? Is that cooking? There are so many things that have been added to the kitchen to reduce time that it is hard to know when something is cooking or just preparing. How much hard work has to go into the final product for it to be consider cooking? Do you have to kill your own pig, grow your vegetables and milk your own cow?

My opinion (which isn't set in stone) and probably my generation's opion is that putting Stouffer's Lasagna is not cooking, but grilling a pre-marinated chicken breast would be cooking. The spices we have on the rack, the vegetables in the frozen bag and the milk we thankfully can buy at the store all are just things to help aide in the process of cooking.

All of this talk about cooking leads me to what M and I 's date last night. You see I have always wanted to cook scallops, but had never had the courage to actually try to cook the difficult mollusk. Yesterday I decide to remedy that situation and I went to the store and bought a pound of large sea scallops. I then looked up directions on cooking them and with the help of M we produced what I considered to be an A+ meal. Below is a picture of the end result:


After that we decided to go see Julie and Julia, which appropriately enough is about cooking and blogging. Both of us enjoyed the movie and would recommend it to anyone looking for a light movie (not to be confused with a romantic comedy) about cooking.

Not much else to report from land of 10,000 lakes. I am still waiting for the Twins win streak that has to be coming any day now.