I am not, what you may call, a “good cook” by any standard but I am in the slow process of learning and improving the little I know. I tend to make a lot of huge mistakes and I tend to burn myself. Badly. I have, on occasion, stuck my bare hands in the oven to retrieve a hot pan and only after setting the pan on the stove do I realize that is not the thing to do. I think I inherent this trait from my grandmother, a short, plump Puerto Rican woman who has spent the majority of her married years in front of the stove cooking rice and beans and is practically immune to fire.

Every Tuesday, my sister and I meet to cook a meal: an entree, sides and dessert. We take turns each week on choosing the recipes and making the meals. This week, it was my turn and I decided to adapt two recipes: Avocado Spicey Burgers from 1000 Recipes (a book which has disappeared from all internet queries) and Dulce de Leche Brownies via David Lebovitz.

My sister and I decided to omit the cumin and peppers to make the spicy burger more tolerable to our tastes and instead used onion, coriander and garlic for seasoning the patties. The avocado mix (the recipe of which can be found through flickr) can be a delicious and easy addition to sandwiches, burgers and salads.

The Dulce de Leche brownies turned out fabulously and surprisingly well. I made a couple of substitutions in the recipe since I was primarily using ingredients I had on hand–I used Nesquik cocoa powder in place of unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder (because that’s how we do in Harlem), almond extract instead of vanilla and omitted the walnuts. I would consider adding walnuts or pecans the next time to offset the richness and sweetness. The brownies were very moist and stayed that way the next day (which is more than I can say for the brownie mix in a box). I received a lot of praise from the family, the boyfriend and the coworkers which has really inspired me.

There’s hope for me yet.

I’ve upgraded Wordpress to 2.2, a process that was full of panic attacks and confusion. I installed Widgets (a feature that really sounds like the name of a long-lost Teletubby) and while everything appears to work smoothly on the site, I’ve already encountered numerous problems with losing half or all of my draft entries. It’s this aspect of blog upkeep which I loathe, the “home improvements” if you will. While I think Wordpress is fairly easy to install and maintain for a variety of computer users, I don’t think the plugins or the upgrading process is simple to understand. I just want to upload and have it work.

Tags: cooking, Daily Jibba Jabba, food, recipe, revamp

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 4:31 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.