The last time I updated, it was just 13 days into the new year and I had just found the kitchen of my dreams in our home that we were still weeks from closing on.
Fast forward to now, just two days until August. I’ve been in my new kitchen for almost five months. It was actually featured on CBS News a few months ago showing me watching Thomas Keller for a feature on Masterclass. It was so much fun!
I discovered that my local butcher keeps cow tongue, cow heart, and a few other organs in the back freezer almost all the time. So I made cow tongue tacos again (the smell of it cooking is drool-worthy!) and I recently grabbed a heart to make stuffed heart with bacon, spinach, onions, and mushrooms again.
We have taken steps to start an LLC for our made-to-order bakery. We’re currently in line to talk to a business insurance agent and a lawyer to get it set up. We’ve had a lot of people asking when I’ll start actually selling the goods I make so I’m excited to get it ready to go!
This year I’ve so far focused on pies, cakes, macarons, and even a little seafood! I found a place that sells fresh salmon and I absolutely love cooking it with some creamy dill sauce. It’s one of my favorite meals, and one of my family’s too. There’s a bunch of fish and seafood pies I want to try as well when the budget allows. I’m on a savory pie kick right now and have a ton of ideas. Next week, I’m hoping to try Steak and Ale pie with mushrooms.
As for cakes, I’ve made a few just recently:
And macarons? I’ve tried a few that I loved.
Most recently are the cake batter macarons and the earl grey and lemon cream macarons:
So the baking front is doing well. Looking up my goals, I did hit a lot of them.
But okay, okay…the Pasta? Not so much. To be fair, I do have Tipa 00 flour currently in the mail being sent to me (because NO WHERE has it in my area) and it’s absolutely on my to-do list.
In fact, we recently started doing one day a month where we cook freezer meals. This month, we made two beef and mac and cheese casseroles, two chicken pot pies, and two pasta bakes. Part of that was supposed to be a tray of homemade ravioli until I realized that pesky 00 flour was no where in my pantry (I had a bag before we moved! I don’t know what happened to it.)
Similar story for bread – I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. To be fair to myself though, I do make my own pizza dough every few weeks so that’s almost like making bread…but no homemade loafs yet. Again, still on my to do list (though this one is way easier to accomplish than the time-consuming pasta one…so I have much less of an excuse here.)
I haven’t started a single Thomas Keller recipe from his cookbooks (though I still use his Masterclass recipes several times a month.) It’s on my monthly meal calendar to choose at least one each month. We’ll see if it starts happening now!
I also totally did that baking logo I was agonizing about. This is what I made for the business card:
This is what I made for the Facebook page and website:
And I did make the baking website – but I didn’t launch it yet because I’m not ready for orders, so you’ll just have to trust me on that one. It’s all ready to go with just one hit of a button though.
So, for the rest of 2021?
I want to at least figure out how to launch the LLC and have all the meetings we’re setting up. I’d love if we launched the bakery this year, but I don’t have the finances mapped out yet so I can’t make this a for-sure goal.
I want to make pasta. Both the stuffed kind for freezing and drying some so I can stop buying store kind all the time.
Do some TK cookbook recipes
Try more macarons and truffles.
Continue cake trials
Create Individual Family Recipes so I can put them into a recipe book next year.
Make some yummy savory pies
Mastering Cooking With MasterClass 