As most people who follow me know, cooking is not my gig. When it comes to preparing food, I have the patience of a two-year-old. Unless I'm putting in a few pieces of toast into the toaster, all other dishes take too darn long to prepare. Heating up leftovers is almost unbearable if it takes an extended period of time. Two minutes seems like a marathon while waiting for the microwave to do its thing.
With that said, I recently gave cooking a try and it went pretty well, at least I thought so.
@farm-mom made some wonderful zucchini bread, five loaves to be exact, and five days later they had somehow disappeared.
She had wrapped four of them for freezing, which was perplexing as I now had to defrost them in order to consume these delicious treats.
When I asked her, "so when are you going to bake some more," I was given the evil eye.
At that point, I knew that if zucchini bread was once again to be there for the taking, I would have to be the one slaving over the oven.
So, with the recipe for the zucchini bread in hand, I got down to it, tasting many of the ingredients as I went along, just like all good chefs do.
FYI one of the main ingredients included in this bread is zucchini and this we had in spades. This past year we had grown enough of this long, green, versatile, and somewhat phallic-looking veggie to make dozens of loaves of bread.
Despite trying to adhere to keeping everything nice and neat and orderly, just like the wife likes, I must admit, things got somewhat totally out of control.
I was determined to complete the mission all by myself but baffled by the body language expressed by the master chef that was observing my every move.
Could it be my approach, could it be my lack of keeping everything nice and tidy, or was I just not following the recipe that spelled out every move and was doing it all wrong?
Well, as they say, the proof is in the pudding.
After precisely measuring out all of the ingredients, I couldn't wait to plug in the electric beater and give that a go. Using a new tool for the very first time always gets me excited.
Using the electric beater was fun until I lifted it a little too far out of the concoction, and the batter flew everywhere. Following this little misstep, I decided it wise to beat the batter with a hand beater. There was a lot of beating going on and at this point and I was thrilled I wasn't getting beat. 😁
The last item to be added to the mix was those delicious cranberries. The way I figured it, the more the merrier. Being merry is always a good thing, so emptying the bag of berries into the mix was a no-brainer, regardless of what the recipe called for.
After preheating the oven to 350 degrees the zucchini bread needed to be baked for 35 minutes.
Now, this new cooking experience took much longer than anticipated.
Hunger was now sweeping over my entire being.
I figured that if I cranked the oven up to 550 degrees I would be able to chow down 10 to 15 minutes sooner.
Just kidding, but it did feel like watching and waiting for water to boil. 😰😰😰