Toasting, Blanching, and Parboiling...oh my!

So today was all about toasting bread crumbs (and burning bread crumbs), toasting hazelnuts and rubbing off their skins (I'm still finding bits of nut all over the kitchen floor--those suckers are like dandelion fluff), and learning how to make bouquet garni and sachet. I now have these beautiful little herb packages and no knowledge on how to use them. I could skip ahead in the book and try out a recipe, but that feels like cheating. Like I'm not really a cooking school of one but instead a very lonely divorcee playing chef. There should be lessons. And a grading system. And papers to write and quizzes to take or this is going to start feeling very pathetic.

I actually did get to pull out the pots and pans today and try blanching and parboiling. I blanched some carrots and then shocked them with an ice bath. You really couldn't tell that I had done anything to them. Maybe I didn't leave them in long enough. And then I parboiled tomatoes by making an "x" with a knife on the end and dumping them in a pot of boiling water. The first batch I didn't leave in long enough, but the second batch was cool. The skin just rubbed off when I ran it under cold water.

My brother, Ethan, came over and ended up eating all of the carrots and he couldn't tell that I did anything to them either. So it wasn't just me.

And thus concludes the cooking portion of this post.

Here is the strange thing about blogging. It's sort of like having a therapy session where you're not entirely sure the therapist is listening. I mean, she looks like she's listening and that's her job so you assume she's not daydreaming about Brad Pitt. But still.

I just thought it was going to be...different.