This year has gone by in a blur. I can’t believe how far we’re already through, so I wanted to check in on my goals even though things are so busy right now.
Cooking has been an interesting ride lately. We began a Costco membership, so now I do my shopping for 90% of our groceries all at once for the whole month. This means I have to plan things out really carefully. I only buy things like milk and sour cream and little odds and ends for weekly shopping. I have a monthly calendar showing all of the meals that I have ingredients for (usually 30-35 at a time), and then I have to make sure I actually stick to that.
With my grandmother passing recently, I was out of the house more visiting her and helping my mom. We ate out a ton in the last few weeks, which has thrown off our budget and our carefully planned out meals, which means I need to be extra careful with cooking now. I need to make sure there’s no slip ups that require eating out, I need to make sure all of my food stays fresh for cooking, and everything gets eaten in order.
My little bakery did really well this year. A little too well – it took over my life and I was frantically baking almost every day of the week. I got a little burned out, overwhelmed, and ached to have a life outside of buttercream and cake crumbs every day. The bakery is still alive and well, but I did stop all cakes for the rest of the year and I’m taking an extended break from being on store shelves. I still offer cookies, cupcakes, brownies, truffles, and all kinds of goodies for custom orders, and I have a ton of stuff I’m excited to experiment with. It’s almost time to start making a huge amount of truffles to hand out to all of our neighbors at Christmas – I’m really excited for that. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to part with my favorite cappuccino ones though, I may just make them first and use them as fuel to get the hundreds of others done! So I haven’t made 12 different truffles (one kind for each month) yet, but I’m sure I’ll be doing all of that at one time instead.
I did work on dessert decorating a lot, especially with cakes. I’ve learned a lot, though unfortunately, I mostly learned that while I can make a pretty cake, I still hate making them.
I have tried out sushi and poke bowls, which has been fun. Just yesterday, I found a place an hour away (right near that Costco!) that sells a huge amount of sushi items to make at home, so I’m planning to visit there next month and see what other sushi creations I can do. Perhaps for next year, I’ll start trying dumplings too.
I am very sad to say, I haven’t gotten a chance to open Thomas Keller’s books. I HAVE tried multiple new recipes from him – mainly branzino and a fish sauce that works great on cod – but they came from Masterclass. I’m hoping once I get into the swing of things with the Costco monthly groceries, I’ll still be able to manage this, but I’m not trying to push it right now. We’re still eating out too much, so eliminating that is my highest priority.
I haven’t touched pasta, but I constantly want to. I still hope to do this at least once before the end of the year. Same with gelatin art – I’d love to do a repeat of last year’s reindeer snow gelatin cake, and I bought little koi fish molds to do a beautiful gelatin lake that I’ve been meaning to do since probably last year. I’d love to get those done.
As for family recipes, I plan to attempt the first steps of that today.
Mastering Cooking With MasterClass 