blog @ The Sea of Wishes

Since I had finals during the weekend of Mother's Day and couldn't make it to my mom's to celebrate, I waited a week, baked some brownies, and brought them down yesterday. We spent the afternoon being nerds by playing computer games while watching movies on the Starz channel, then we went out to the local Japanese steakhouse for sushi (or in Mom's case, cooked appetizers and a salad). I had a tuna roll and a fujiyama roll, which is basically salmon tempura, cream cheese, and cucumber inside a maki roll topped with spicy tuna and tempura flakes. It wasn't the best roll I'd ever tried, but it was something I'd never tried before and it wasn't bad. My mom actually tried one of them, too. I'm so proud of her for trying her first piece of sushi containing raw fish because she's tried California rolls, sweet potato rolls, and shrimp tempura rolls before but never anything containing raw fish before; however, she still doesn't really care much for sushi in general. I'll have to find a roll that she likes.

After dinner, we made some margaritas and continued playing on our computers while watching movies on TV. Eventually the movie Julie & Julia came on, and I had been interested in seeing it because it had to do with cooking, which is one of my newest hobbies as of last year. At some point there was a scene in the movie in which Julie was shown making and later eating a hollandaise sauce with artichokes, and the combination of this scene in the movie along with my memories of seeing artichokes in the refrigerator earlier in the day and of trying hollandaise at a restaurant in Richmond several months ago inspired me to try my hand at making a hollandaise sauce myself.

So my mom made artichokes for lunch today and I made a hollandaise sauce from a recipe on Allrecipes. My hollandaise was not perfect; it was a little runny and not as smooth and creamy as it should have been, and I think I cooked it too fast or too hot, or maybe I didn't separate the eggs well enough, but we still enjoyed it. I have since found the original Julia Child recipe and plan to try that one sometime in the future.

After lunch, we got on the subject of cooking in her family and she mentioned that her grandmother used to make meringue kisses, and I was inspired again, so I found another recipe for chocolate meringue cookies and decided to make those. They just came out of the oven a little while ago, and I think that once again maybe I didn't separate the eggs well enough and then maybe I cooked them a bit too long, but they're still really good. I'm planning to bring them to my boyfriend's place and hopefully surprise him with them tomorrow, as long as he doesn't read this before then and I don't accidentally tell him (because I'm so bad at keeping secrets). You better not be reading this before tomorrow.

And that concludes my adventures in cooking for today! Maybe I should invest in an egg separator sometime in the near future.

Labels: baking, cooking, dessert