Hi all, I am Alex. I am a senior in college for computer science. My family loves to cook, so I have never really had to learn. Growing up with cooks, though, has provided me with many hints and ideas, though I have never applied any of this "absorbed" knowledge to any cooking projects of my own. I know I will have to learn to cook sometime, though, and now that my sister is temporarily unable to cook (she is the primary cook in the house) I figure that now is as good a time as any.
I have a small amount of vision. I can see a bowl on the counter, for example, but cannot see that I missed some sugar while mixing; I can see where the stove (one of those annoying cooktop ones) is in the kitchen, but I cannot see enough detail to see the sides of the oven or where the "burners" are on the flat top of the stove. With that in mind, here are the questions I have come up with, after today's adventure of making a cake: 1. For those of you with cooktops (where there are no physical burners but rather just one flat surface), how do you position pots or pans in the right place? 2. Perhaps this will come with practice, but one of my biggest fears while cooking with an oven is that I will hit the sides of the oven with my wrists or forearms while putting something into or removing something from the oven. How do you avoid this, as potholders or even oven mits only cover the hands, not the arms, and the arms are much closer to the sides than the hands? 3. How, when you are mixing something, do you tell if you have mixed thoroughly enough? While mixing the wet ingredients for the cake today, I was told that I had missed a few pockets of sugar, but I could not have felt this through the wisk. 4. How do you pour liquids into measuring spoons? I can manage cups well enough, though pouring oil is difficult as it is hard to feel, but I cannot figure out a good way of pouring into spoons? I considered putting things like oil or vanilla into larger containers so I could just take a spoonful, but is there a better way that would not require such large containers? 5. Tomorrow's experiment may be spaghetti (our family does not believe in canned sauce, so it will be from scratch). How will I tell when the ground beef is browned? Similarly, how would I tell if a hamburger or steak was done? What about other types of meat being prepared on a stove (as opposed to in an oven where a thermometer could provide a good indication)? 6. Has anyone come up with a way to figure out where the teaspoon markings are on a stick of butter? I had to have someone score the butter at the teaspoon line so I could cut off the right amount. In fact, before that, I had no idea that such marks were even on sticks of butter; I always thought you just had to soften the butter and take a teaspoon to it somehow. 7. Are there any good websites for recipes? By good I mean both accessible with a screen reader and containing good-tasting dishes. TIA for any help. I may not stay on this list long as school starts next week and so I will not have much opportunity to cook anything, but I hope to figure a few things out for this week and then try again next time I am home on break. -- Have a great day, Alex (msg sent from GMail website) [email protected]; http://www.facebook.com/mehgcap _______________________________________________ Cookinginthedark mailing list [email protected] http://acbradio.org/mailman/listinfo/cookinginthedark
