baking with laser-like focus and mad skill in a kick-ass black outfit
My mother loves this photograph. A lot. She told me today that I should enter it in a photo contest (you may or may not know my mother, but her saying this is a pretty big compliment). The thing about the photo is…it’s great. But I really didn’t do it.
~This is the sixteenth post in a series running through the month of June 2009 in which I attempt to post once a day for the month.*~
From “The Tao Of Poker”
Rule 79: In the whole poker process, the least stable part is the player.
The true glitch in the system is the human element. The weak link in the chain is us. Everything else is pretty well scripted and defined. The hands you should (and shouldn’t) play, starting cards, stats, rules, probabilities, and best plays are all well known, tagged, and identified. The loose cannon in the process is the player. Therefore this is the part we have to work on and get under control.
~This is the fourteenth post in a series running through the month of June 2009 in which I attempt to post once a day for the month.~
I think it’s important to remember failures as much as successes. Focusing on failure is frustrating and depressing, but in the midst of success, it’s easy to forget how difficult it is to master new skills. As adults, I think this tendency can really hinder our learning. We forget how hard learning can be and we’re afraid of looking stupid, so when we’re just starting out, we get overly concerned about not being good at the thing we’re learning.
Our neighbors recently came over to borrow an ingredient they needed for their dinner. No big deal, something we had on hand and something we willing handed over, being neighborly. Today, one of the neighbors came by to “return” what they had borrowed – that is, they had gone to the store and bought a replacement for us. And that made me kind of sad. It was a polite thing to do, to be sure, but something about it felt very isolating – as though what we gave them was thought of as a debt to be repaid instead of a kindness. It was something to “get off the books” instead of an ongoing…for lack of a better word, conversation. An ongoing trading of favors. It felt as though they were saying “yes, we needed you once, but we paid you back, and now the relationship is over.” They may very well not have meant that by their gesture, but that’s how it felt and it struck me as odd, standing there with the “return payment” in my hands.
Considered the “mother of level measurements,” Fannie Farmer gave precise amounts in her recipes at a time when most called for things like “a piece of butter.” Like Julia Child, she was a teacher above all who wanted to give women the skills they needed to make their way around the kitchen, and in some cases, the knowledge they needed to take care of themselves with a “respectable” career. She also believed that diet and nutrition could make a huge difference in a person’s life, particularly the sick and those with life-changing illness like diabetes. She did not let her own physical ailments (paralyzed for a time at 16 and permanently walking with a limp for the rest of her life) stop her.
I just got back from my walk about and stopped at the fridge (after plowing down an ample helping of last night’s leftovers standing right there in the middle of the kitchen) and noticed this list on an envelope, magneted (is that a word?) to the fridge door:
This is what it says:
Oil
3-4 sliced garlic
Zest on lemon
med heat
Pasta
1/2 cup water fr/noodles
squeeze lemon completely
reduce
fresh Parmesan
Pie was never my favorite food when I was growing up, but for some reason, I asked my step-mother for an apple pie one day when I was about 8…
Confession time – this whole baking thing happened by accident. I was not the kid with the easy-bake oven and I don’t have any memories of baking cookies with all the women in my family. One day while we were at the grocery I asked for apple pie, likely having just laid eyes on some Hostess pre-packaged thing full of green filling, and my step-mom led me to a life-time of baking by misunderstanding what I wanted – how cool is that?
Pizza is a wonderfully collaborative food. In our tiny kitchen (about 3′X5′), pizza is one of the only things that gets made as a real team effort; there’s really not enough space for two people, but this is one food that requires two distinct talents – baking (to make the dough – that’s my specialty) and cooking (to make the toppings – definitely not my specialty).
I’m searching for a job right now and it’s not much fun. I don’t want to make the cold calls, the warm calls or even the hot calls necessary to land the job of my dreams…which is crazy, because I’m looking for the job of my dreams, so shouldn’t I be excited about this challenge? And it’s not that I am lazy – not at all. I routinely spend 10+ hours a day working at a job that I’m trying to replace. And weekends. In fact, my current job is eating up all my time – my precious time. The time of my life. So why am I not spending every moment that I am awake, every moment I can spare – this moment now – in the pursuit of that new job? That’s all that there is between me and it; my own reluctance to push forward. Any why? Well, because finding a new job is hard and I don’t really know what I’m doing. But wait!! Didn’t I just make a cake that was really hard? Did I know how to make that cake? Didn’t I say that I had never made a cake like that successfully before? So what’s the difference?
At last I have made a freaking decent loaf of bread. Where most of my efforts have turned out something like this:
