Out of work due to a back injury but taking the time to persue my passions, pets, crafts and cooking! Because of my back I've had a hard time coming up with a career path to follow, but no matter what I do I have to rehab my back and body so why not do something I love? I'm in the VERY early stages of heading to culinary school to become a pastry chef. I need to first build my body up to handle it and second find some way to pay for it, which I think might be harder than combatting 4 disc herniations. I've been making alot of potroasts(lots of requests),mashed potatoes(with everything!) my souped up meatloaf, minnestrone, cheese battered eggplant, brownies, cupcakes, waffles, cookies..... My Belgium born, italian honed grandmother is famous for making normally icky veggies craveable. Nutmeg and bacon brussel sprouts, browned-butter cauliflower, olive oil and garlic green beans.... healthy? Who cares! My most recent triumph was mastering the red wine potroast. I'm moving onto souffle as soon as I can afford to buy the cups ;o) I also concocted my own eggplant parmagiana. My problem with most you get is that the eggplant is swimming in the gravy(sauce lol) and ends up soggy and the packaged mozzarella is way too salty. So I battered my eggplant instead of breading, fried it, dried it, put thin slices of fresh mozzarella(laid with basil beforehand to impart a little flavor pre-oven it burns in heh) over top of a few pieces then baked it until the cheese got gooey put my favorite docotored gravy over just before serving and a side of angel hair. Mmmmmmm gotta make that again soon. I tried making sausage gravy to go with biscuits because though I'm yankee born I wish I had a southern granny to teach me how to cook all that great food. I had already given up on making the biscuits from scratch due to workload and reluctance to buy so much buttermilk when I needed so little. (I dont know if you know this but buttermilk tastes nothing like a 5yr old thinks it would lol) So I had my tube layer biscuits in the oven, browned up the sausage to render the fat to start the rue...well I'm pretty sure I just burnt the life out of the rue. Instead of being a beautiful creamy off-white gravy, it was a coffee and cream colored concoction to rival epicac syrup lol. Since then I havn't had the heart to try again, let alone make another rue. Being a non-southerner I just dont think these yankee hands were bred to do it properly.