A new cooking resolution

C and I have recently become unexpectedly drawn into the hopelessly compelling Great British Bake Off on BBC2.  As far as television goes, it really is fantastic.  Anyway, watching the technical detail which the contestants apply to their scones, bread and cakes has made me ashamed of my own cavalier approach to cooking in general.

Cooking and baking is such fun, and something C and I have been lucky enough to have done since we were both very young.  However ... I usually just glance at a recipe and throw ingredients together and rely on some sort of intuitive wizardry to make everything work.  It usually works (occasionally brilliantly) but sometimes it does not.  Once I added a whole jar of truffle sauce instead of a spoonful to O's wild mushroom pasta; I recently turned jam into a strange thick toffee that is still sitting in a state of total solidity in a jar in the kitchen; most recently when cooking for O and T I used half as much cream as I should have done in an experimental recipe which resulted in a Jarlsberg and hazelnut pasta bake that was just about edible, but only in a 'we've been lost at sea for a week' kind of way.

So, three months into keeping this blog, I have a resolution.  The original intentions of the blog were to mark the seasons and write down good recipes instead of forgetting them, but I shall add to this the promise to start paying attention to detail and try and learn abit more of the craft of cooking and baking, and then maybe then those who taste my experiments may have more pleasant surprises instead of just surprises.