Do you have cooking/baking tasks that you particularly enjoy?

[swimboy]

My favorites include

kneading warm bread dough

making a well in the center of the dry ingredients and adding the liquid ingredients

and, probably revealing too much, slipping the outer layer off of roasted beets

What do you enjoy, out of logical proportion to the effort?

[NYC_SKP]

1. I love the smell of dough, any dough, and using rolling pins.

Including ravioli pins, we baked almost everything growing up.

Also, little tasty treats of leftover dough!

Yum!

[swimboy]

3. one of the best treats

snacking on dough!

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. Ah...cooking tasks I love are....

chopping - the prep part - onions, peppers, scallions, greens, tomatoes - you name it. Love the prepping and chopping part.

cutting butter into dry ingredients to make scones...and then forming and cutting the scones.

making risotto - slowly stirring stock into arborio rice with veggies. One hand to stir, the other to sip the wine!

[swimboy]

4. Sipping the wine is an earned reward for making risotto!

People talk about how much trouble it is to make things from scratch but I also enjoy the focus of prepping everything prior to assembly and the satisfaction of combining disparate elements and transforming them into something altogether different. Time well spent!

[bif]

7. That's one of the main reasons I love making risotto!

You simply can't make it without a glass of vino in your hand!

[blaze]

16. Chopping.... dicing....

Don't know why I love this part of cooking.... I'm a mise en place kinda person.

Chop... mince.... dice.... maybe there's a bit of meditative quality to it for me...

[LeftofObama]

5. I've often said that I find the whole process of

cooking and baking to be therapeutic. There's just something about measuring the ingredients, doubling or tripling a recipe and then sampling your finished product. And the compliments when you've just finished preparing a meal make the whole thing worthwhile.

[elleng]

6. Liked PUNCHING DOWN bread dough.

Been MANY years since I've done it.

[swimboy]

9. Oh yeah!

The whole works deflates around your hand. Very satisying.

[livetohike]

8. Kneading bread, rolling pie dough and

stirring a stir-fry and hearing it sizzle .

[swimboy]

10. That reminds me

I also enjoy browning meat before it goes into a stew, watching it caramelize.

[fizzgig]

11. i love the act of cooking itself

hate prep work, i often make my husband do the prep monkey work. but the process of turning many things into one is a meditative thing for me.

[TreasonousBastard]

12. Does eating the result count? How about the compliments you get when...

you come up with something really good? Or just watching them enjoy it.

[pinto]

13. Chopin

[pinto]

14. i.e. Vanilla ice cream with chopped berries and shaved chocolate

[NJCher]

15. the esthetics

I love the beauty of chopped vegetables and combining the colors. For example, a favorite salad of mine is a tossed green salad into which I put sliced yellow peppers and purple cabbage, sliced thinly.

Beautiful!!


Cher