Reflective Essay: Why I Get To Cook At Home

When I first received this assignment I was excited by the opportunity to cook at home, and the opportunity to choose what I got to cook. My gut instinct was to peruse Pinterest for meals that I wanted to cook, I selected the five most interesting I found. After baking the first assignment, cream puffs, I realized that I should focus on everyday meals that I knew my family enjoyed. In the end, I ended up cooking: cream puffs, schnitzel, cream cheese pound cake, pot roast, and banana pudding.

The first thing I decided to make was cream puffs. I found a recipe on Pinterest and decided to try it. At the beginning of the recipe, everything went well and I made the dough with relative ease. However, where I believe the problem occurred was when I began to mix in the eggs one at a time. I used a stand mixer to save time instead of doing it by hand, but

Everything went rather well in this recipe. Except my grandma did not have Pam at her house to spray the sides of the pan. Instead of Pam, I sprayed the sides with Crisco. This made the finished cake stick to the sides of the pan, and not come out as smoothly as I would have liked. Besides that, the cake was a bit dry because the oven runs a bit hotter than most ovens but I failed to take that into consideration when baking the cake. I believe that the cake had a nice flavor despite its dry texture.

I cooked a pot roast next. For this dish, I used a dutch oven. I made this in the morning because it has to cook for a long time. I forgot to prepare the vegetables to go into the dish the previous morning, so I had to cut all of the vegetables early in the morning so that it would ready for lunch. I didn’t cut the potatoes into small enough pieces, so there weren’t that many pieces of potato. I also should have been a bit more careful while searing the meat, to not get hit by any oil coming out of the pan. Overall, I think the roast tasted good and turned out rather