Well.
My favorite thing to “cook” doesn’t really involved cooking at all; I much prefer to bake.
And if I am going to bake, I like to bake bread.
This is less about the process than it is about the end result, though!
I’ve written before about how I cook because I like to eat, not because I particularly like to cook.
And baking is largely the same way; I got into yeast baking as a teenager because I wanted to eat more homemade bread.
(How do you get to eat more homemade bread? Make it yourself!)
So. My favorite thing to eat is fresh yeasted baked goods, ergo that would be my favorite thing to bake.
If we get even more specific, I might say that my grandma’s apricot sweet rolls are my favorite thing to bake and eat.
If we stick strictly with cooking….boy, I don’t know! I’d put quesadillas up there pretty high because:
- they’re easy
- they’re Tex-Mex (my favorite!)
- they can go with guacamole, sour cream, and salsa; three very good sides)
A holiday meal probably because I like the tradition around it. I like making Thanksgiving dinner because of all the sides you get to have with one meal. I love cooking Christmas dinner, whatever it is that year. Often I will make a German meal because that’s our heritage and my Grandpa always loved that. This is all hard to picture now though because it’s already getting quite warm in my part of CA and I wouldn’t want the oven on that long!
My favorite things to cook are dishes I ate as a child. I eat very differently now than I did as a kid, so it is not an everyday type of experience.
My dear late aunt use to make an eggplant parmesan dish for all special family occasions. It was more of a layered lasagna with the breaded eggplant substituting the pasta squares. The dish takes a few hours to assemble.
I recently made this for my family. I happily peeled, sliced, breaded and pan-fried eggplant while fondly thinking of childhood memories of my aunt. And when my husband and son complemented the meal, I proudly told them it was an Aunt Jo speciality.