I've been cooking a lot the past couple of weeks. I'm not sure why, but I go in spurts of doing a lot of baking and fancier cooking. It's summer right now and, being a teacher, it's pretty obvious why I'm doing so much cooking. I have two months off of work and plenty of time. So far in the past two weeks, I've cooked the following:

1. Chili. And this wasn't just beefing up the Bear Creek Darn Good Chili Mix like K and I usually do. This was entirely from scratch. I even made my own chili powder by cutting up dried ancho, New Mexico, and arbol chiles, toasting whole cumin seeds and then grinding it all to a powder with garlic powder, oregano and paprika, in my old blade coffee grinder. It was really spicy the day I finished it, but by the second day, the flavors had mellowed a bit and turned into a really good, but really thick, chili. It was also a good way to use up one of my leftover lamb shanks.

2. Flageolet Beans. I got some dried flageolet beans from Seedsavers.org to see if I wanted to grow them in my garden next year and I finally got around to getting a recipe and cooking them. This is probably one of the best recipes I've cooked in a long time. The original recipe called for dandelion greens (silly french people), but said I could substitute collards. Being a good southerner, I went with the collards. Besides, the drought down here killed all of the dandelions anyway. The beans are famous for cooking down into a creamy sauce on their own, which worked well with the savory and sage, and the onions, carrots and garlic. Absolutely delicious side dish, even though I just ate a bowl of them for dinner a couple of days ago. By the way, if you're even midly interested in gardening, Seed Savers is a great website. They specialize in preserving heirloom vegetables and fruits. My entire garden this year came from either them or Sand Hill Preservation, another heirloom preservation farm.

3. Cheesecake. This probably a basic thing, but I've never made the stuff before. This is usually something that K would have made (she's a killer baker), but I wanted to make it on my own for once. It turned out incredibly good. My mom came over every day for a piece until it was gone. I mixed it a little too vigorously, though, so it got too much air and ended up getting cracks in the top. Great texture and flavor though.

4. Alton Brown had an episode of Good Eats on milk the other day and did a dulce de leche recipe, which is basically a caramel sauce made from sugar and milk. I decided to try that to go with the cheesecake. It took three hours to make (longer than the cheesecake), but made for an incredible dessert. It also goes pretty well with apple wedges, which is how I'm using up the leftover sauce that didn't get used up on the cheesecake. Courtney mentioned my obsession with former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, but that's a very low level obsession. My obsession with Alton Brown and Good Eats is a true obsession. I'm not stalking the guy or anything, but I do always hope to catch a glimpse of him when I'm in Harry's Farmers Market in the Atlanta area or St. Simons Island. I once e-mailed him trying to get an internship with the show after college, and got a very polite we're-not-hiring-right-now response from someone working for him. My life would be so much happier had I gotten hired with the show. Or not.

5. Bread. I've done this before and made a damn tasty loaf, but I'm going to have to stop making the round loaf and go with the baguette shape. The past two times I've made it, it rose too close to the elements in the stove and got slightly overdone on the top. I'd tried making bread before and it'd always sucked, but I saw the Good Eats bread episode last year and after following the show's advice my success with bread REALLY changed. Instead of overly dense and way too chewy, I got a fluffy inside and a appropriately chewy crust. Bread's all in the process. The ingredients are just too simple to make much of a difference (other than the making sure to use the right sort of flour.)

6. Rice pudding. This one kind of inspired the post tonight. I grew up on this. My mom would make it the day after she made rice for supper. In fact, she'd always make too much rice just to make sure she'd have enough for the pudding. Still, I've never made it, and she's out of town today, so I had to look up a recipe. Too many of them weren't true custards, and rice pudding HAS to have an egg custard base. The recipe I went with used the eggs and milk that I expected, even if it was a more complicated process than my mom would have ever bothered with. I also don't use raisins in rice pudding. It's not that I don't like raisins; it's that I think raisins bring one too many flavors and textures to the party. I like rice pudding to be a more simple dish. The creamy custard should contrast with the the starchy rice, and the mellow eggy-milky flavor of the custard should contrast with the bite of the cinnamon and nutmeg. Anything else just clutters things up. Just for the record, that recipe was too much rice and too little custard. Still tasty though. I'll probably use only half as much rice in the recipe next time.