Baking with Chef Fil

I have never been one for cooking; the activity requires a bit too much forethought, patience and cleanup for my noggin.

However, in the past two weeks my ambivalence for cooking has been replaced with a passion for delicious, easy, and fast recipes. My constant companion in this has been allrecipes.com. My guinea pigs? Filippo and Dany. And it is only right that it should be so. Why, it's Fil's fault that my new hobby is so culinarily invasive! In love with the Disney flick Ratatouille, he wanted to make the french dish from which the film gets its name, which led me into the arms of allrecipes.com.

First attempt? Not a huge success...ends up I'm salt-hesitant. But the salted-up leftovers were fantastic! Ratatouille is a 100% veggie dish, normally composed of peppers, zucchini, eggplant, onions and tomatoes. Fil was sufficiently disappointed. But the Remy costume was satisfying.

Unhampered by my distaste of cleaning up, I have continued in my quest of discovering low-maintenance deliciousness. I have been hugely successful! I've already experimented with a second veggie dish, two chicken meals, and a pork roast. They were easy, fast and tasty.

Yesterday, I used my new interest in cooking to introduce my Italian family to pancakes! They tasted like pancakes! And they were wonderful with real maple syrup, imported directly from Krogers, USA.

Today, Fil and I wandered together into the land of baking. Once again media-inspired, Fil has been clamoring for American pie. He's a fan of Word World, an educational cartoon where everything and everyone is composed of letters, and they have multiple episodes with P-I-E, PIE! Unfortunately, he didn't quite grasp the concept that we didn't have to just find the letters "P," "I" and "E" and push them together for blueberry deliciousness. Even more unfortunately, I didn't realize that it wasn't the ingredient-equivalent of the letter-pushing until I was cutting butter into the crust mixture.

We have yet to try the pie, but the smell is divine. Next on the list: Cake Balls.