Emeril Lagasse is making chocolate candy tonight. He's using a thermometer to measure the temperature of his boiling chocolate candy. The only time I use a thermomter is when I'm making hard tack candy, which I make once every 5 years or so. For fudge and those wonderful no-bake cookies, I use the ice water method. You keep a bowl of ice water near the stove and when it looks like the candy is about done, you drop a little bit into the ice water and if it forms a soft ball of goo, then it's done. Cooking Thermometers are for sissies.

Tonight, I made a blackberry cobbler for dad. I felt like baking something since I've got those five days off. For a while, we were on a search for the best cobbler crust recipe and Jamie Oliver 's was one of the best we tested. But tonight, I just mixed up butter, sugar, flour, an egg, a little milk and a tiny bit of vanilla and drizzled it onto the berries that had been coated with sugar and dotted with a little butter. I didn't do any measuring, I just estimated. I mean, you pretty much know you need about twice as much flour as you have sugar, and if you're mixing up a small bowl, then one egg would probably be ok, enough milk to make the batter as runny as you need it to be, about a quarter to a half of a cup of butter, and about a teaspoon of vanilla.