Mild Amusement

The other day, the Mild Wife and I decided to make a cheesecake for a family gathering. Neither of us has ever made a cheesecake before, but both of us happen to enjoy eating cheesecake, so we figured we'd give it a go. As she often likes to point out, we should know how to make the things we like to eat (why wait on other people if you can help it?). So, we (read: she) found a recipe online . This particular recipe was from Better Homes & Gardens, which is not a publication that I read very often. Still, necessity makes for strange bedfellows, so there I was, happily reading the online version of that magazine. It's worth noting that the reason the Mild Wife chose this particular recipe was that it had less cream cheese than some of the others that she'd seen. You see, she'd joked many moons ago that if I ever saw what actually went into a cheesecake, I'd change my mind about eating it. I don't like tons of butter in my food, and I don't have a par...

These days, I do a lot more cooking than I used to. As the Mild Wife has often pointed out, I should probably know how to cook some of my favorite dishes. Plus, we both enjoy the process, and I make a decent sous chef . In the process, there have been quite a few amusing stories. I can now pick out the ingredients in my food with better-than-zero odds, I get to plate the food however I want to , and we even managed to find some funny Amazon reviews in the process. Ultimately, the point is that cooking is an enjoyable process for the Mild Wife and me. I suspect that's a big chunk of the reason why we enjoy watching the Great British Baking Show . I fully realize that baking is not the same as cooking savory food, but it's still fun to see people create things. And in some ways, the fact that it's a different skill set makes it easier to sit back and watch. I am not realistically going to make royal icing any time soon, so it's fun to watch it appear when someone else...

Bread has always been a staple for me. We owned a bread machine in my house when I was growing up, so there was usually a loaf of bread somewhere around. It also played a prominent role in the infamous "mandatory" breakfast , so it's a part of the Mild Fiancée and I's lore, too. The Mild Fiancée likes to bake, as well, so we tend to have flour and eggs lying around the house. I help out where I can (I eat the bread, too, after all), but I'm by no means an expert. So, whenever she says that we need a certain ingredient for our bread, I tend to go along with it. That was the case when she suggested that we needed vital wheat gluten. Now, this is not something that I have ever shopped for before. I didn't really make bread, I certainly didn't make wheat bread, and I don't ever try to add gluten IN to the food. Still, we decided that we needed vital wheat gluten, so we set about to shopping for it. At one point, we decided to see if Amazon could deli...