Cooking Disaster - Illustrated

I enjoy cooking for an everyday chance to experiment, an opportunity to work with other people, and, frankly, because I love to eat. In particular, I like making desserts and one of the reasons is because I get to eat them and then draw them and then eat more of them. Making cookies is such a satisfying thing - while you are working a dough you can get a lot of energy out of your system, or in when you are tasting them :) I've been making oatmeal cookies for years and some come out as good as a song, others are great, sometimes they are a reliable staple, but recently I had a batch that... was a fiasco. 

After tasting this cardboard I realized that I forgot to put sugar and it is actually a very much needed ingredient for other components to work! It melts and binds and seeps and it makes the cookie a cookie! 

After a day or two I made a fresh batch - just to mend my discolored self-esteem and because I wanted an oatmeal cookie - and this time my creation was devoured with the usual speed - so all is good now. Lesson learned!

Illustrated Recipe: Three ways to cook beets and three salads to make with them!

Beets are a great addition to a salad when they are raw but they are amazingly versatile when cooked! These savory and dessert salads are in constant rotation in our household!

Illustrated Recipe: Carrot Salad

 This is a very easy, sweet, savory, a little spicy and always festive recipe for a carrot salad.

Recipe: Eggplant Caviar

This is a wonderfully simple dish that my grandma used to make: she called it caviar - probably because of all the seeds (from tomatoes and eggplants) that are visible in this spread.  

Recipe: Forshmak (Jewish and Polish versions)

 

Both of these are old recipes from two parts of the family. Polish version takes more time and I personally prefer Jewish one - but in any case it all starts with the salted herring and goes from there! Enjoy! Oh and it looks like some people spell it as Vorschmack!

Recipe: Lobio

I had so much fun drawing the borscht, and it inspired so many lovely online and offline conversations that I decided to draw more from the kitchen lore of my family - here is Lobio! 

Recipe: Borscht

There are many wonderful spellings of this word БОРЩ in English but I will stick to this one: BORSCHT. It is a very tasty Ukrainian beet soup, winter version of which is eaten warm. I will draw the cold one when it is more appropriate for the season :)

I drew this for my friend Suhita and she followed this recipe to make it and liked the result - so it is proven to work :)