Mutilation, Books, and Strawberry Plants

Armed with a meat cleaver right out of a B horror flick, a pair of bone tearing kitchen sheers and some Good Housekeeping instructions, I lay the bird down on its back and proceeded to hack at it and tear it apart as if it was my worst enemy. It all sounds so gory but it was fun....in a weird and twisted way. I just cut up a whole chicken for the first time in my life and quite honestly, I was a bit intimidated by the whole thing. I kept thinking I was going to chop one of my fingers off with the damned cleaver.

I had been craving chicken noodle soup for a while and after trying some vile UK canned stuff, I decided I was going to make my own......from scratch. I didn't think it would be such a time consuming process but I am an hour into the process and dinner isn't going to be till at least 7pm. I hope it's really tasty otherwise I'll import some Campbell's Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup, which is what I wanted anyway.

On that note, I read on a website a couple days ago that while Americans love home cooked meals, there has been a big drop in actual home cooking and people are eating out more and more. Surprisingly enough, this has occurred at the same time that the sales of cookbooks and cooking magazines have increased to all time high and interest in cooking, thanks to cooking shows, has exploded. Americans fantasize with a dream kitchen and many spends thousands of dollars in kitchen renovations, sometimes taking out a second mortgage to do so only to have those new, shiny kitchens go unused while the family dines out. I have to say, I am one of those Americans.

For instance, I do fantasize about the perfect kitchen, I buy lots of cooking utensils, cooking appliances, cookbooks, cooking magazines, kitchen gadgets, you name it; yet, I hardly cook. I do enjoy cooking but it's just too time consuming even if I do have loads of time. As a perfect example, yesterday we went to Borders and I got not one, not two, not three but four cooking magazines, 3 of them expensive American imports. I don't really read them, I mostly look at the pictures and the names of the recipes and doggy ear the ones I think look good, then the magazines sit in a corner of the second bedroom or perhaps the hallway until I put them away somewhere, along with the hundreds of other cooking magazines I've accumulated in the past 6 years that I just can't bring myself to throw away. I have countless cookbooks, although probably not as many as other people, and they sit on the shelves most of the time; every now and then I pick them up and maybe pick a recipe and give it a shot or if I'm craving something, I'll look it up and try to make it. I am not a good cook; I just follow recipes really well.

As if cooking and buying cooking stuff wasn't enough, I have recently felt the desire to plant my own strawberries, which then gave way to planting my own herbs. So, yesterday before going to Borders, and being the main purpose of our trip, we went to Homebase seeking out the garden center. Again, following a magazine article, I picked a strawberry pot (it has holes on the sides), a bag of compost and a few strawberry plants that are now sitting on the hallway. I will plant them tomorrow and hopefully we'll have berries in the summer.

I'm not sure what's taken over me. I can't quite pin point when I started having all these domestic urges.....me a city girl wanting to plant stuff....preposterous! Maybe it was when I made those cupcakes a few weeks ago. Perhaps it was when a few months ago I, foolishly, volunteered to have my in-laws over for a Christmas Eve meal that would require me to spend 2 days in the kitchen. I had never cooked such a meal before, especially not for so many people. The most people I had ever cooked for were 4 and it was easy shrimp bisque a good 8 years ago. As you can imagine, a meal like that is when all those dusty cookbooks come in very handy.

So, if anyone knows how to stop these domestic urges, please let me know, I have a reputation to keep up!