Adventures in homemaking

When we returned home from Italy we finished writing our thank you cards and then we got to play with our gifts! Everyone got us such great things we barely knew where to start first. In the end we were swayed by our culinary adventures on our honeymoon to do more cooking at home.

First off Todd set out to become an expert barista. With our handy espresso machine Todd turned out many tasty coffee beverages which compared favorably with the genuine Italian article. We were compelled to buy real espresso cups to complete the effect.

Next we got bread going in the bread maker. It smells so good to come home to baking bread! We read the recipe book cover to cover and bought lots of yeast. So far we’ve made pesto bread, olive and parmesan bread, cherry bread, sun-dried tomato mozzarella bread, Stollen, and honey whole wheat bread. Everything is delicious! And it is hard to resist eating a slab of warm bread with butter right when the loaf comes out of the machine.

Todd was particularly excited to add the pressure cooker to the registry and I have to admit I was a little skeptical. I hadn’t had much experience with pressure cookers so I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. After our first pressure cooker experiment I knew! It cooks everything extremely quickly and keeps the contents moist and tasty. For our first experiment we made risotto. Ordinarily risotto is a treat reserved for long weekends because it take a long time to cook and requires constant vigilance. But in the pressure cooker it took 7 unattended minutes to yield a delicious result. Taking advantage of this time saver we used the risotto as part of a larger recipe and made cheese filled risotto balls from the vegetarian cookbook. Not content to use just one appliance we also used to fryer to cook the risotto balls to crispy perfection with gooey cheesey centers. Yum.

An appliance that is totally underrated is the rice cooker. Such a simple thing like making unscorched rice is harder than you’d think, especially when you get distracted while cooking dinner. What better than to be able to insert rice and water and then get perfect fluffy rice. Better yet, you can set it up ahead or time and it keeps the rice perfect and warm, without drying it out for hours. Now I sound like an infomercial, but it is true. This is another appliance that allows you to make a more complex meal in much less time than you’d ordinarily be able to.

We also ended up with an excellent array of barware. From glasses of every variety to a shaker with recipes we are ready to make drinks to go with every meal.

Now we just need more time at home to enjoy all our fun stuff.

P.S. This is where I make an embarrassing confession and admit that despite what I’d like to think of as my uber planning abilities, we don’t know who gave us one of our gifts. We got a lovely cream colored tea pot and tea and we have no idea who gave it to us. If you know who did, please tell us so we can thank them properly!