Up to your elbows in meringue?
Can’t pipe worth a squat?
Is your roulade’s whipped cream all over the floor?
Yeah… all and more have happened to me!
Cooking disasters happen to all of us. But rarely did anyone ever write about the cautions, the extra steps we had to take to avoid calamity, until: “Cooking: It Ain’t Rocket Science.”
Now the rookie cook can step into the kitchen and “master sophisticated recipes using a ridiculously easy, step-by-step method.” Series One: Baking: Desserts, Pastry & Bread not only delivers recipes for sweet, savory, choux and puff pastries, it guides you every inch of the way toward pastry success.
Learning to cook ISN’T Rocket Science. It IS all about reading. And reading again until the words of the recipe create a picture in your mind. That’s when you’re keyed in to what cooking is all about.
A photograph of a recipe evokes your senses. But the words that comprise that recipe are what lure you off the sofa and into the kitchen. You start salivating. You KNOW you can make that recipe and you already taste it in your mouth. That’s what cooking is all about! Your imagination is replacing someone else’s reality (and usually that someone else is a professional cook with a professional photographer following them around!)
I thought baking potatoes took about fifteen minutes. Until my dinner guests sat down to their rock-hard offering. Needless to say, they all left with small brown paper bags with their potatoes snuggled inside…to be continued in their own ovens!
I tried those silicon pot holders. You know, the ones with the rubberized padding. My Irish stew didn’t see the humor when the casserole slipped out of my hands and onto the floor. Count – five seconds, and you’re good enough to serve. A tip from Julia Child!
And that Pumpkin Cheesecake I made for a family Thanksgiving dinner? Whosh – in seconds it was out of the pan and onto my kitchen counter – all because my fingertips pushed up on the springform pan’s bottom, releasing all that cheesy-pumpkin goodness. The tears on my face told the story as I watched the goo ooze and the dessert flop.
If you can read, you can cook! And through “Cooking: It Ain’t Rocket Science” you’ll reveal your own “inner cook!”
It’s All About Me
It’s a slow day in the news world. My telephone rings. A reporter needs something to write about and I’m the best copy they’re going to find at the moment.
A few days later, said reporter shows up at our carriage house door – an idyllic 150 year-old cottage nestled in the foothills of the Brecon Beacons (those are mountains) near Abergavenny, Wales. An interview is conducted, and photos are taken.
Before you know it, the shop girl at our local market greets me with: “I didn’t know we had a celebrity living here!”
Celebrity is fleeting. But my fifteen minutes of fame have landed me in several newspapers – South Wales Argus – and on television and radio a few times, including as the “Go-to American” for BBC-Wales whenever a voice from the “Colonies” was needed.
In my storied past, I had the good fortune to meet the head writer of “Days of Our Lives,” a soap opera airing on NBC. Pat Falken Smith dragged me along as part of her writing team as we moved from “Days” to several other soaps (writing teams were fired a lot) including “General Hospital” during the traumatic “Luke and Laura” storyline.
I wrote long-term story for “As The World Turns” dialogue for “Capitol” and treatments for many other shows, most of which were canned before the first frame was shot. Blame it on the networks, not the exciting writing!
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