Baking 101: Intro to Culinary

Mr. Brulee and I are a perfect example of the old adage “opposites attract”. We are diametrically opposed on almost everything from our political views to our taste in music. What does this have to do with my culinary pursuits? Our most obvious difference is on bread. He rarely indulges in bread not wrapped around a significant hunk of meat, and I can eat it as a meal in itself. A preference for bread may seem a trifling and insignificant point. But, I LOVE bread, from fresh baked ciabata to week old store bought, toasted or soft, slathered with butter or dry as a bone. Really! I am renowned for my love of the stuff, actually having once being dubbed the Sunbeam Queen. I adore bread.


For over a decade of marriage I have offered toast to my husband every morning, and to my dismay, my husband has declined, now literally thousands of times. Upon discovering my baking book, Mr. Brulee casually says “So, why don’t you make some bread?” You can imagine my shock. So, I baked a loaf of bread. And it was GOOD! Ok, I realize I did not create life, but I felt as if I had. I, a mere human being, had essentially recreated the human genome project, in bread terms. From a crude blueprint of simple bread DNA and correct sequential ordering, I had formed a perfect loaf of edible bread. What else was I capable of? Brownies? Chocolate cream pie? Cake? Could I produce crepes?

To my astonishment, I could and did. By following the recipes, and delaying cocktail hour, I had a zero percent failure rate. I have since learned this was an amazing stretch of beginner luck (more on that later) but I hadn’t been this confident since acing my pathophysiology test. Could I actually be talented at something other than bathing and toileting the infirmed? With this kind of power in my hands, I decided to expand my resume and found food care plans that included proteins and vegetables. So I have been baking and cooking since and am ready to see if I can make a career out of doing something I love.

Mise en Place Part 2

Why culinary arts? My love of food goes back to childhood. I remember… humm, what I remember is refusing to eat about 90% of the fare available in my home. It wasn’t that wonderful meals weren’t lovingly prepared, but my version of eating my greens was an occasional Granny Smith apple.


Let’s fast forward to my teenage years. Like most adolescents, I was different. I was determined to be proactive in saving mother earth and her creatures. So I put down my aerosol Aqua Net hairspray and became a vegetarian. The only stumbling blocks to my new lifestyle were a hatred of vegetables and naturally flat hair. So I purchased a tub of hair gel and became a grainetarian. French fries, toast, and cereal were my dietary staples. Then, some months later, a kindhearted individual intervened and drove thru McDonalds. “What do you want?”, she asked. I ordered a Big Mac (which does have lettuce!) and decided to leave saving mother earth to the next generation. It was around this time I made a solemn vow not to have a kitchen in my grown-up house. There was no need; I was NEVER going to cook!

In my 20’s I bought an orange plastic box full of 70’s recipe cards. Not to learn to cook but the retro look would be a nice addition to seldom used apartment kitchen. I never once used the cards, but I did venture into cooking. Nullifying my ‘well thought-out’ plans, again. Did I mention that I am notorious for such behaviors? At any rate, I became a creative amateur cook, with a 50% edible rating.

Then, a few years ago, looking for a priceless antique or at the very least a valuable ancient coin in the attic of a relative’s house, I found a baking recipe book. Little did I know that musty, dusty cookbook would be one of the most significant instruments of change in my life…

Mise en Place Part 1

Greetings. The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my culinary experiences but first I must tell you, briefly, about my previous experiences. I have been a nurse for about 15 years. College was never an option for me. In my family you went to work or you went to college. I, not being very enthusiastic about work, went to college. Unfortunately, I had no ambition to be anything other than unemployed. A friend suggested we be nurses. We would make money and with any luck marry a doctor. How could we know then that doctors are hardly tolerable in the work force much less in the bedroom? So off to nursing school it was. I soon discovered a passion for the social aspects of college (read drinking) and then a love of academics, or a love of being better at it than everybody else. So after graduating with a B.S. in Nursing, I assume my role of providing care and compassion to those in need. To be honest, my feelings toward nursing are ambivalent. I love it and I hate it. No regrets in any case. “Why would you quit nursing?” is a question I get a lot these days. Apparently, there really is a limit to how much s**t you can take.
Luckily, I now have an opportunity to be anything I want. (Primarily due to my very supportive husband, who is an engineer by the way, not a doctor!) A do over of sorts. So that is where this story begins…