Experimental Cooking Day!

I can't remember if I've ever written about Sunday's on my blog before.

Sunday's are my weird, funny, kinda special kinda sad day. You see, on Sundays, after church in Chatswood (which is wonderful) I kiss my husband goodbye and head home for the afternoon. My studious (and handsome) man spends the afternoon studying hard either at church, the library, or the coffee shop- and then goes to evening church. He then catches the train home and I heat up the left-overs of whatever I had for dinner. I suspect that in-between all the studious (and handsome) goodness there might be video game playing at Harvey Norman, and some unhealthy food eating while I'm not there- but I'm fine with that ;)

And what do I do during this time? Theoretically I work really hard, go for a walk, cook some dinner, and do some cleaning while I wait for Tim to go home. But the problem is, as an extrovert on the extreme end of extroversion- I go mad and get a little sad without him :( Not sad enough to spend the whole day studying at Chatswood with him- but a little bit mad and a little bit sad.

So, as well as all the theoretical productiveness, I also do a fair bit of reading and DVD watching to cheer myself up. I have a lovely chat with Mum each Sunday to burn off some of that extroversion. But I decided I needed a new form of entertainment. Enter: Experimental Cooking day.

I love cooking very much. But, I find it hard to get inspired- despite the many cooking magazines clogging up our bookshelves. So I decided that Sunday would be the day when I would do some experimental cooking. This is my second experimental cooking day. The first involved roasting my own semi-dried tomato's. Unfortunately- for some reason they didn't really dry- but they cooked a bit and tasted pretty good on my roast veggie and mince pizza so I didn't mind.

And today- today I made ricotta!

I found the recipe in a Donna Hay magazine and it looked really easy. And as I love ricotta and don't like the price- I thought this might be a perfect experiment. I was a little bit concerned as Donna Hay method seemed to be different than taste.com.au suggested. And taste.com.au has never been wrong before. But Donna Hay had such artistic pictures of food- surely she knows what she's talking about? So I tried it. Sandy and I brought muslin for draining and Tim and I found a cheap candy thermometer- and I was ready to go.

Did it work? Well, technically it did. But it took 6 cups of milk to create 1 cup of ricotta. So I'm starting to think that maybe the price of ricotta at the shops isn't too bad after all.

Home-made verses store bought is always an interesting dilemma. I was burnt a little bit my first go at ravioli- so much time and the results? Not as good as Latina.

As my Nan once told me: "You spend hours in the garden working on your lettuces. You plant the seeds and you weed and you keep the bugs off. And then you go to the shop and see lettuces for one dollar each. Its rather depressing."