Navaho Gunleg

As I mentioned last month — working from home has its pros and cons.

I recently discovered a new ‘pro‘: it allows me to experiment with making food. Of course, I got a sweet tooth, so at the moment I’m only making things like candy and pastry.

It all started with a couple of cookies that worked out pretty well and ever since it has gotten a bit out of hand — it’s starting to get the proportions of a new hobby. I get up early to start making some preparations, then I go to work a bit and in the afternoon I mix it all together and throw it in the oven, if needed, and at the end of the day the whole house smells of goodness. (The girlfriend, when she comes home, begs to differ though.)

And I think it is a good thing, too. Usually I stay glued to my keyboard and hardly get off my seat. Now, I’m actually taking a break. It occasionally happens that I get stuck in some problem because I keep over-looking the real cause because I’ve looked at the code too long. Sometimes, after such a ‘break’, I immediately notice the thinko or typo that was causing problems. So that’s cool — just as experimenting with food is… It sometimes still makes me wonder how these guys ever came up with some recipes, though.

Last week, for instance, I made this excellent batch of marzipan. Well, excellent-ly tasting anyways, the final product was a bit moist. Too moist to be really called marzipan, it was more of a very fine almond meal and it was excellent in the ‘filled cookies’-variant that I made the day after. BTW, I gather filled cookies are something typically Dutch and found an excellent base recipe for the dough here (a Dutch site, but the recipe is in English as well — actually the site seems like a good reference for a myriad of things nice).

Anyway, being curious as to how the ‘real‘ filled cookies would turn out, I today prepared some new almond meal and dough and the cookies are currently baking in the oven.

My preliminary bet (by tasting the dough) is that these things are gonna be pretty damn good.