How to Make an Edible Strawberry Balloon from Strawberries

Well here's the thing. I understand that the fanciest of neo cuisine type places actually don't make much money, even at the stupid prices they charge. Between expensive techniques and time consuming ones, they don't make much.

I think of it as a wonderful opportunity to charge high prices to restaurant customers.

I like to cook too.

But this is more a long involved chemstry experiement than it is cooking to me...

Cooking is a hobby to me, so I try to challenge myself from time to time. Sometimes that involves making something new and complex, other times it involves doing something simple very well (the latter tends to be much more difficult...). How frequent I do something more elaborate waxes and wanes as I have enough other interests and overtime at work, but probably averages at least every other month, or at least once a month if you count the similarly labor intensive efforts to try variations on a simpler recipe to improve it.

And I can appreciate cooking on a budget, as my interest in cooking really picked up while in grad school, and I still try to keep a almost as tight food budget now to save up for higher priorities. There are some ingredients, tools, and techniques that will not be accessibly to a certain budget, and even more not accessible to a certain budget and restrictive free time. But outside of those, there are still infinite variations to try and learning to cook lets you get things you normally couldn't afford (or get things not available period). Of course, if you want those things without taking the time and effort yourself, the costs can add up quick.

But at the same time, how often do you do somethign that labor intense?

I guess it's the fact that I'm poor and that strawberry probably cost at least 40 bucks that has me scratching my head the most.