Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?
I'm getting a little behind on these because of work/home requirements.
I made Thanksgiving dinner for my family this year. We made turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy. We made everything from scratch. I'm trying to do more scratch cooking lately because it's better for you and really not that hard. For example, while being a buyer of cranberry in the past, I found it amazingly easy to make the sauce with fresh cranberries. So easy that I wonder why the canned stuff even exists.
We had a 11 pound turkey for 6 people. We used a citrus brine which we started the night before. It was our second attempt at doing a brine and it worked quite well, the only thing I would have done differently is thawed the frozen turkey a little bit more before we put it in the brine (it was straight out of the freezer). We stuffed it with vegetables in lieu of traditional stuffing.
I made a traditional cranberry sauce and stuffing, which both turned out very well (I halved the stuffing recipe but forgot to halve the salt so it was a tidge salty, though nobody complained to my face).
As far as what I aspire to make, I aspire to be a better cook/chef in the kitchen. I've got a lot of the basics down, but I'd like to improve my knife skills and maybe learn a few more basic things. I also want to hang out with my food inclined friends while they cook more in 2011, if I'm able to.
