How I started cooking over the winter break:
Hi! Were you guys wondering if I would ever post a blog post about cooking and warriors? Well, today I am going to talk about cooking! I will start writing about Warriors sometime very soon in the future. If you are new to Firestar Creations, welcome! Firestar Creations is a newly created website about cats, cooking, crocheting, and knitting. ( I recently added books). Warriors is a series of books about cats, and I am currently reading it and it is one of my favorite series. So, why do I like cooking? I like cooking because even though it is hard work, it pays off at the end because you get to eat it.
How did I get inspired to start cooking ? I could explain at a point I would normally explain, but there is a thing that you need to understand before. I don’t know how long ago it was, but it was some years before. And that’s a LOT! When I was a little kid, I didn’t like to go to the bathroom. Then, I did go to the bathroom because I got a reward during the process. Do you know what that reward was? That reward was watching a short little video. Back then I was watching Mickey Mouse, Olivia, and Peppa Pig. Then, as I got older, a few things happened. First of all, I was watching longer videos, like 20-30 minutes. Secondly, I was okay with going to the bathroom and not getting a reward. So, I started to watch those videos on the TV, right before dinner. You may be wondering, how does this all have to do with cooking?
Well, at some point, I was watching Just Add Magic and The Worst Witch. I had finished with both of those, and I was beginning to get tired watching the episodes over and over again. Usually, when I finish 1 or 2 of those video series, I get recommendations on what to watch next. One of the recommendations was MasterChef. When my mom looked it up, there was MasterChef Junior, which was obviously for kids, so we got that one. When I was watching it, I had gotten amazed in what kids my age could cook. Then, for Hannukah, I had gotten the MasterChef Junior Cookbook. I had made some things from the cookbook. Now, not all that I made was from the cookbook. For Christmas, our neighbors gave us homemade cookies. So we decided to make stuff in return.
We made Nimki and carrot pudding, and my mom looked those recipes up on the web. Nimki is a savory snack, popular in India. This was my mothers favorite snack, growing up in India. It is made out of flour, oil, and these special black seeds called black cumin seeds. We mixed all of these ingredients together, we kneaded the dough, then we rolled the dough, and then we cut the dough into diamond shapes, and finally fried those peices. We made a ton of nimki, some we gave away to the neighbors, and some we kept ourselves. I really liked the nimki.
We also made carrot pudding, or Gajar ka Halwa as it is said in India. Gajar is the Hindi word for carrot. Halwa is a pudding like dessert. This required grating many, many carrots, and it was tiring. After some time, we ended up using a food processer. After grating the carrots, sautéed the carrots in ghee. Ghee is clarified butter, commonly used in India. Then we added milk and, and stirred it for a long time until it had the consistency my mother expected. We also added sugar when we added the milk, because it is a dessert. At the end, we decorated the Gajar ka Halwa with raisins and cashews. And that is how I made Gajar ka Halwa.
Some of the favorite recipes from the cookbook that we chose and made were the cupcakes and the lava cakes. If you want to make the cupcakes or lava cakes yourselves, you can look at the cookbooke I mentioned earlier. The page for the cupcakes starts at the page 191, and ends at the page 192. The page for the lava cakes is page 186. If you don’t have all of the ingredients, you can substitute. For example, the recipe for the cupcakes calls for passion fruit, but we used mango. I liked the cupcakes because of the beautiful decorations of the caramel swirls, and I like the lava cakes because of the gooey part in the middle.
All the recipes were fun to cook, and tasted yummy. All of the recipes was great. And everybody likes different foods naturally. I can’t cook as often now because the winter break is over, but I really enjoyed the winter break, and cooking all these things made my winter break even more enjoyable.