What are some good DIY cooking projects?

http://lifehacker.com/tag/cooking/

The waffle iron stuff is often both awesome (for ingenuity and sometimes convenience) and horrible (for taste, comparatively).

@occ: oooo, would you let me know how the cheesemaking kit works? and maybe send me the link? also, any special pickling techniques? I have always wanted to pickle onions, and maybe some other things, I’m going to do some research!

My specialties are baking, oriental cuisine and beer brewing. They’re all fairly simple once you have the basic techniques mastered.

Make some homemade wine.

home made fortune cookies, with your own made-up fortunes.

I was going to suggest cheese making, but then I saw you’ve ordered that. My sister-in-law and I used one of those kits to make our own fresh mozzarella, and it was amazing!

Sushi

If you are already pickling, you could make some jams.

My favorite food project of the summer was making my sister 24 little pies and cobblers for her freezer before I left her house.

You can also get into making Chinese or Japanese dumplings which are fairly easy to make, make a metric ton at a time, freeze well, and are super tasty.

Or you could make some ice cream—easy, fun, tasty.

How about bread-making? My sister always made her own, and it was from scratch and not in a bread-maker. Her pirozhkis were the best. She’d bring them on our beach vacation, and we’d eat them for breakfast.

Make fresh pasta. It’s amazing. My hubby makes his own and I always complain about the mess he makes for me to clean up and how long it takes, (when he decides to start dinner at 6pm and we don’t eat until 8pm and the kids are tired and cranky) but it really tastes good and different.

Homemade flour tortillas are really tasty, and quick and easy, too. I got my recipe here.

Cheese making is good! You’ll enjoy that. Nothing as good as homemade cheese!

And I remember what we used to call “pickled peaches” when I was growing up in Texas. Don’t try to make “pickled peaches” from a Yankee’s recipe – it tastes like peach pickles. Yuck. But I found a recipe for “spiced peaches” that’s pretty similar to what I remember:
recipe. And a tip – put a few cloves into the jars before adding the peaches, and after you have the peaches in the jar slide a stick of cinnamon in there, too. If you’re going to be canning, this is delicious! And if you save the syrup it’s good on ice cream or plain cake.

@EmpressPixie: I love you. I was searching high and low for my Christmas project this year and I just found it. And it’s not crochet… woot! You’re my new favorite person.

Home mead pasta seems cool. More effort that I have time for, but it looks awesome.

Did I actually write home mead? And that instead of than? What a dope.

Oh.. I saw that individual pie stuff and loved it too, but I don’t trust myself (plus no room in the freezer filled with hubby’s film for his several cameras) and I think I would eat too many of them myself.

Another thing that is LIKE cooking but doesn’t make food is soap making. I’m completely addicted and created a little business out of it.

with those individual pies… I’m assuming I should bake them before gifting them, right? Otherwise I’d have to gift everyone a cooler and some dry ice too… lol

You’d have to make them fresh and gift them in a few days of making (after keeping them in the fridge) them and then recommend that they either freeze them or make them right away.

they’d freeze okay already baked?

ohhh I see what you mean. Give them unbaked.

Beer is always fun and who knows you could become the next Sam Adams

Funnily enough. homemade mead is doable, if that’s your thing. Growing (or picking) herbs and drying them for herbal teas can be fun, too. Homemade old-fashioned doughnuts are addicting as all heck. But my personal favorite has got to be apple cider. Mmmm…