Solutions

speculoos

Cooking is a combination of things.  It's utilitarian.  It's peace-inducing (at least for me). And it's creative.  The creativity comes not just in coming up with tasty combinations of flavors and textures, and so forth, but also in finding interesting ways to do things.

For instance, the speculoos in the photos above.... I could cut them using standard cookie cutters or biscuit cutters, but I choose instead to cut them using a pizza wheel.  I really enjoy doing that.  It's fun, it allows for creating unusual and whimsical shapes, spontaneous and unique.  And it's so easy and very very quick to do.  Certain cookies I would never dream of using a pizza wheel to cut.  I love making round frosted vanilla sugar cookies, and for me part of the allure is that perfect roundness with that layer of frosting on top that is not quite round since it's applied by hand and hence has inconsistencies from cookie to cookie.  So that combination of very round versus not quite round I find interesting and fun to do do.  It's a creative combination of perfection and imperfection. And I love imperfection.  I always like to say that perfection is a commodity too often sought.    

For me, creative and interesting ways of doing things often result from simply trying to find solutions to something that is not quite what I want, or to something that is more work than I feel it should be.  

Once up on a time I used to pour honey into a tablespoon and then empty that into a mixing bowl, often a bowl filled with what would shortly become bread dough.  I like a few different types of bread that have a little bit of honey in them, sometimes in place of sugar, sometimes in addition to sugar.  Anyway ... when I would pour the honey out, it would always cling to the tablespoon and I felt compelled to work at getting every little bit out that I could while the honey worked counter to that and tried to cling to the spoon.  Then I discovered that if I dipped the spoon in vegetable oil before filling it with honey, the coating of the oil made the honey slip completely off the spoon, leaving very little residue behind.  I have always found that to be very satisfying, to know that the exact amount I'm measuring out is going into the bowl with no real effort on my part to make it happen.

It's very satisfying to look around the kitchen for solutions to things like that.  If I find a way to do something that does not require buying yet another tool or gadget, that's something rewarding to me on multiple levels.  That being said, sometimes solutions are few in number.  I love using garlic and my garlic press is the best tool I can think of to crush that garlic, release the outer husk, and give me an easy way to put garlic in things without resorting to dicing into smaller and smaller bits or smashing it with the side of a knife or the bottom of a mug, neither of which pulverizes the garlic in the same way that a press will.  When I think about what I spent to procure a good garlic press, it seems out of proportion sometimes with respect to how restricted the use of this tool is.  Perhaps there are other ways to use this tool, but so far I haven't discovered them.  It's a garlic tool and only a garlic tool. 

That's OK, though.  I also find it tremendously satisfying to crush garlic cloves in that press.  I don't know why, but I do.