What I can do is cook. The tea for the math department (about fifty people or so) is this Friday. I feel I should clarify that I did in fact volunteer to cook for this -- Kev would have been more than willing to just buy food for it instead. But planning and executing this kind of complex cooking maneuver is fun, though I don't do it with anything like Meriko's virtuousity -- every one of her plates looks like it came out of a five-star restaurant. Maybe I'll do that someday; for now, I'll settle for everything being tasty and sufficiently warm when served. :-)
This afternoon, I made milk toffee, the beef curry for curry buns, and this evening, I'm in the midst of ginger-garlic chicken (chopped small, which will go into mini pastry shells on Friday morning and bake. Kev is my sous chef in all this, which is definitely needed; cooking for fifty by yourself would be no fun. Cooking with him is fun, though there's already been one minor disaster, when my milk toffee refused to set. I think I didn't cook it down long enough. It seems to be setting now, extremely slowly -- we'll see what it looks like in the morning. If it still hasn't set by then, my mom recommends dumping it back in the pan with a little water, bringing it back up to temperature and cooking it down properly. Would be tricky not over-caramelizing it in the process, though, so let's keep our fingers crossed that it'll finish setting tonight.
Speaknig of finished, I'm about finished. Bedtime soon. One more student response to finish in the morning; wouldn't be fair to him to finish writing it now, when I'm so groggy. More cooking tomorrow, plus looking at eleven (!) houses in Wicker Park in three hours, followed by an open house for prospective students at Roosevelt. Should be a good day.
Nice to know that even the cookbook author has occasional trouble getting the milk toffee to set right. We used the viscous batch as an ice cream topping a couple of times before realizing that the dignified thing to do would be to toss it and make a new batch, which came out much better.
🙂 It’s my aunt’s recipe; I’ve only actually made it twice before, though I didn’t have any trouble either time. This morning, it’s set enough to cut, but still more caramel than it should be. Haven’t decided yet how I’m going to handle it — I may try the put it back in pan approach, but I think I’m also going to pick up some more condensed milk to make a second batch, just in case. 🙂
I was also deeply disturbed by the Very Large Sum my mortgage person was willing to let me borrow. The monthly payment would have been about 25% higher than the number I had calculated to be the maximum I would consider.
Banks & Mortage people have a very strange view on money. And yet, it works. Most people will sacrifice ANYTHING before a house payment. Therefore, they are comfy that you’ll keep that payment going, even if you are eating ramen. Grrr…. and people wonder why they get “house poor.”
There is some justification to lending you more money that you think, in that very few people can accurately guess how their tax situation will change and the other savings one gets from house living over apartment [laundry coins being a small one, but a real one]. But not nearly enough to justify $375k versus $300k.