Pudding
Both the Oregonian and NYT Food sections have big articles about pudding this week. Completely different articles written by different people. Is late February pudding season? Does pudding go hand in hand with the Lent season? What secrets does pudding have to offer?

Both articles include something called Indian Pudding, NYT's is Indian Cornmeal Pudding and this apparently has some connection to American Indians. I had no idea. Where did the tribes get the milk?

I recently found a blog via megnut where a woman is going to cook everything in the French Laundry cookbook. I thought she had a post where she talked about challenging herself in the kitchen and I'm not finding it right now so either I'm making it up or just can't find it because, as usual, I'm doing this in a big hurry. This is just like the whole Julie/Julia project where another woman cooked everything in Julia Child's Art of French Cooking Cookbook.

I'm not insane enough to attempt to cook every recipe in a single cookbook but this got me thinking about trying harder to find recipes for things I haven't made that would be fun and yummy and take some work. The thing I like about cooking is the tangible reward after all the work is done that can be shared and appreciated by others. My least favorite part about cooking is dishes.

I don't mind general dish duty but when I'm into a big complicated thing and every pot and bowl and tray and spatula in the kitchen gets dirty and I have to constantly stop and wash and dry for reuse, or put away so I have a place for the next steps or else I have to reconfigure the dishwasher to cram more stuff in or empty it and that eventually makes me cranky. I should point out that I'm the kind of person who can't go to bed if there are dirty dishes in the sink.

At the moment I'm wondering about making one of these pudding recipes this weekend and I have more to say but there are people paying me to write a memo about the Indian Civil Rights Act and not to write about me and my recipe selection strategy so perhaps a sequel tomorrow.