Cookbooks

Hi everyone. Phew, I made it to the end of the #AtoZChallenge! It’s 11PM now, but I still badly want to write a post for Sherry’s In My Kitchen linky. I could of course write it tomorrow, as it’s technically a beginning-of-the-month linky in Sherry’s timezone, but that feels off to me. Sadly, though I had planned to do some cooking, I haven’t actually prepared any dinners this past month. However, I did enjoy several other kitchen endeavors.

First, I downloaded several new cookbooks off Bookshare. One of them is Coffee Creations by Celeste Wong. I really want to be able to create my own coffees. That being said, being the scatter-brained person that I am, I didn’t pay attention to the fact that most coffees I felt like creating (lattes) are espresso-based. I did buy a milk frother last Monday, but not an espresso machine. Now I’m either having to be creative by deciding that a regular coffee can be the right base for a latte, or consider the milk frother an impulse buy that isn’t for me. And to be honest, I’m not even sure I like lattes, as I enjoy most specialty coffees more for the syrup and add-ins. I did buy a few bottles of coffee syrup that are probably way too large for me to use up before they’ll go bad.

Other than that, I’ve also been creating smoothies. I created the best cherry chocolate mocha smoothie. When starting the blender, it made a weird noise, so I was worried that some cherry pit had remained in my store-bought packet of frozen cherries. I guess not though, since there were no pit remains in my smoothie as far as I could tell and I didn’t get sick either.

I also made a mango-passion fruit smoothie. Yuck! I used mango, passion fruit, banana and coconut water and I guess I don’t like the taste of passion fruit, as I’ve used all other ingredients before and had no problem with them. My fellow clients did claim they liked this one though.

Lastly, I have one kitchen adventure to share that was a success: flat bread topped with cheddar, sun-dried tomatoes, red onion and bell pepper.

When running the photo through Be My Eyes, an image description app, it identified every ingredient correctly, including correctly naming the flat bread. It however did say the flat bread was topped with “orange cheese”. I was apparently already totally blind by the time I saw cheddar for the first time, as I can’t remember its color. I asked my best friend whether this was the pinch of cayenne I had used or whether cheddar is orange. It turns out in the Netherlands, cheddar is colored with annatto and as a result is a little orangey. Originally, it is a white cheese. Isn’t that interesting?