This is one of my favorite video clips.  To me, this is the pinnacle of success.  And not because it put a few guys into space.

Today’s tip is a bit philosophical, but I promise to make it up to any and all reading with four straight weeks of practical tips that don’t make your brain hurt.

I want to talk about benchmarks.  I’ve always sort of known what the word means, but never thought about it much until I went back to school.  Even then, I thought about it more in the context of “will knowing what the word ‘benchmark’ means get me a good grade on this exam/paper?” than I really thought about it.

Until recently.  And for a change, I’m going to keep this short and sweet and just get to the point; I’ve been thinking that it’s a good idea to have benchmarks for success.  Every.  Single.  Day.

Sure, I’ve always had a “to do” list, but I’ve never really taken stock, on a daily basis, and thought “what would need to happen for me to feel really great about this day?”  Benchmarks.  Something to measure against.

If you’re trying to get better at cooking, or anything, I think you need benchmarks to help you out, so you can measure your progress.  Because learning a skill – whether it’s a new skill or one that you’re trying to bolster or refine – requires a way to determine whether what you are doing is helping your progress, or hindering it.

And “it tasted good” or “it looked perfect” isn’t enough.  That’s far too broad.  You need to be more specific.  Like the guy in the video.  Notice he says “Liftoff, we have a liftoff at 32 minutes past the hour.”  And then he says “the tower is clear.”  He’s marking off all the successes of the launch, rather of focusing only on whether or not the shuttle goes into space or if the guys make it to the moon.

He’s a smart cookie, our tower controller (or whatever he’s called, I have no idea).  He’s listing off everything that is going right, for future reference.  This is really important when you’re learning something new or trying something for the first time.

Because I guarantee that not everything will go right the first time.  It might not go right the 48th time.  So if you’re frustrated with your cooking, break down the things that need to be remedied and give yourself little benchmarks for success.  If the chicken always sticks to the pan when you make Chicken Kiev, make your next success benchmark the chicken not sticking and then focus all your efforts on that thing until you make it happen.  But give yourself a specific goal that you can work your way to, systematically, a little at a time if necessary.

And remember to have a little glass of wine when the tower is clear.

Hope that’s helpful!

Cheers.

It’s a wonderful quote, one that I think of a lot while driving here.  I love it because it speaks to the fact that the question is impossible to answer, and yet Ms. Davis does answer with the simplest and easiest solution.  I also like it because, although you could interpret it as being flip, it  has a sense of “don’t be intimidated.”  Just take the first, simple, easy step and go from there.

I never get asked how to “get into” cooking – most people I know who cook have been doing it far longer than I have.  But if I were asked, I would answer with my own version of “take Fountain;” choose something really simple, really easy, really delicious (your “Hollywood” – the end goal – delicious food).  And also something that doesn’t have a lot of weighty consequences.

So, for instance, I wouldn’t try something that included 72 steps and 3 oz. of black truffles, or my grandmother’s sacred pie recipe.  Those are for later, when you’re more confident, when you’ve survived a couple of disasters and know that you still want to go on.

I have said that my mothers never really taught me how to cook, and I’ve always considered the start of my real cooking education to be when I decided to imitate an impossibly complicated strawberry tart on the cover of Food & Wine Magazine.  That’s actually not true.  My mom (the natal one), did teach me how to cook – not Boeuf Bourguignon, but I was in the kitchen making food much younger than many people I know.**  She was the one who showed me my “Fountain” – Scrambled Eggs (which I did manage to screw up memorably at least twice), and Macaroni & Cheese (from scratch).

If you’re intimidated by cooking for any reason, please feel free to try my version of taking Fountain below.  In many ways they are the cornerstones of all the cooking I’ve ended up doing in the last 20 years.  I still make these (not as often as I did before I found Indian food), and they are always there waiting for me if I need them, simple and delicious.  Thanks mom.

Cheers.

Scrambled Eggs (a la Diane and Goose)

Two eggs***
tbsp butter (or less if you’re watching your fat/cholesterol/weight)
Salt and pepper to taste****

Crack the eggs into a small bowl and beat lightly.  If you like, you can add a bit of milk (I believe that’s a Julia Child trick) or a bit of water (that’s a trick from my step-mom, who says this makes them fluffier).  Add a bit of salt and pepper to flavor (you can add more later if you want).  Melt the butter in a small non-stick pan over medium heat.*****  After butter stops foaming, add eggs and stir from time to time with a wooden spatula, moving the eggs off the bottom of the pan as they cook.  It’s probably a good idea to turn the heat down at this point and cook them slowly, until they are like a custard, or more, if you like them drier.

You can also add things like cheese, chives, onion, hot sauce…anything really.  Then they will be your scrambled eggs.  Mine always just have some salt and pepper.

Macaroni and Cheese

(very loosely adapted from the 1953 Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book)

Ingredients:

1 8 oz. package elbow macaroni (or about 1/2 of a 16 oz package – probably slightly more)
2 cups cheddar cheese, cubed or roughly shredded on the big holes of a box grater
2 cups milk
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
pepper

Directions
Cook macaroni according to directions on package.  Use a big pot and lots of water.  When cooked, drain it well and put it back in the pot (once it’s cooled – if you put it back into a hot pot, the noodles will stick).

Make a white sauce with the butter, flour and milk.******  Start by putting the milk in a small saucepan on a back burner to heat it.  Stir every once in a while so it doesn’t burn on the bottom.  Then melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat.  When melted, add in flour, whisking well to make a smooth paste.  It will bubble.  Cook for just a minute or two and add a bit of salt and pepper.  Add the hot milk, a little at a time (like a 1/2 cup or so).  Whisk like there’s no tomorrow, making sure you don’t have lumps.  Keep adding the milk until all of it is added, then take a rubber spatula and really scrape the bottom of the pan to see if you have any butter/flour paste in there.  If it comes up, try to blend it into the sauce with the whisk (don’t worry about it too much).  Stir with the spatula until the sauce starts to boil – take it off the heat immediately!  And immediately (while it is still really hot), add the cheese and stir until it’s melted and blended.

Pour this over your macaroni, fold it all together until well mixed (you might want to taste it now, because you’re the cook and you can).******  Pour it into a 1 1/2 quart casserole (I’ve increased amounts here, so hopefully this will all fit – if not, use a bigger casserole).

Bake mixture in moderate oven [350°] 45 minutes. Makes 6 servings.********

If you like a crispy top, you can put it under the broiler for a few minutes, but please keep and eye on it – I don’t want you burning your mac and cheese or your house down in a grease fire!

*If you don’t live in Los Angeles, Fountain Ave cuts across the city and even now when traffic must be much worse than when this quote was said, it’s still can be like a mini freeway through the city.
**I realize this contradicts almost everything I’ve said about my cooking history – it’s too long and complicated to explain in detail, but let’s just say there were “eras” where my mom taught me how to cook, and also when other more pressing things took center stage.
**If you want this to taste really good, these have to be eggs, not whites or any other substitutes.  I eat egg substitutes sometimes, but they are not delicious eggs!
***Pepper not added by my six-year-old self – the very nascent beginning of the “do it like you like it!” philosophy.
****The pan doesn’t have to be small, but it does need to be non-stick.  A larger pan will require more effort to keep the eggs together.
*****Making this recipe is how I learned to make a white sauce, which has been fundamental to my cooking.  It will help you learn how to make gravy, sauce and get you started on all kinds of other things that need to have a hot liquid added to a thickener.
******You also might have some cheese sauce left over, because I’ve altered the recipe.  You want the macaroni to be really smothered by the cheese sauce, but it’s not cheese soup with a few bits of macaroni.  If you do have too much, I apologize for my poor proportions, and I suggest you get a few cubes of something (bread or broccoli or whatever) and scoop the sauce out of the pan with that and eat it.  It’s really pretty good.
*******If you make this and have me over with 5 other people, please double this recipe!   Seriously, if you’re eating it as a main course, it’s for 2-4 people.  Side dish, maybe 6-8.

But the thing that struck me about the article wasn’t so much that someone had figured out that people have an algorithm for learning; what I thought was interesting was that this understanding flies in the face of how we generally perceive progress. In a great post on Facebook, Derek explores the idea that when practicing something, it’s really when we sound/look/feel our worst/sloppiest/crappiest that we are making the most progress.  If we’re doing it perfectly, we’re not stretching.  No stretching, no learning.

Which made me think of another excellent post I read recently from The Communicatrix, about writing.  Her post encourages writers to get better at writing by….wait for it…writing!  Surprise!  But I think (yes we’re getting to the point here) that what is challenging about writing as a practice for making good writing is that it’s really, really, really hard to see progress.  Really.  Hard.

That’s where photography comes in.  I started taking photos a couple of years ago for this blog.  I started the blog because I joined an online baking group called The Daring Bakers.  That’s the only reason I started it, just to have a place to post the stuff I baked each month.  I happen to live with a photographer who is both very patient and generous, and as I posted my monthly challenges, he started to make suggestions on how to improve my photos.  And they worked!  Going back through this blog, there are a lot of really bad photos.  But moving along through them, there’s also marked improvement.

How did they get better?  By looking at other photos I thought were good, by listening to my teacher and by…wait for it…taking a lot of photos!  Surprise!  But the great thing about photography is that you can see very clearly how you are improving.  That’s harder to see with writing.  But because the process is the same (exposure to other work, copying, having a good teacher, practice, making a lot of crap and throwing it out, saving the good stuff), practicing photography helps me have faith that practicing writing is actually making me a better writer.

Since this blog is all about food, most of the photography here is food photography (I wasn’t going to make you wait for that one).  If you are interested in food photography, there happens to be an excellent blog – Learn Food Photography – that is jam-packed with info, interviews (extensive interviews), theory/philosophy and all kinds of references that can help you begin (although I also recommend just trying to take some photos).  This blog is a great source of info for anyone who wants to take gorgeous pictures of what they eat.

That was long – but hopefully helpful.  Good luck in your learning, whatever it is.  I hope it gives you a lot of pleasure and blows your mind.

Cheers.

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.

I mean, I did. I took it. But mostly I just waited for it. This is something I’ve learned from the husband, who is a photographer (cinematographer, technically, but they both make pictures). If you see a photo in a situation, and you wait long enough, a picture will come. Or it won’t. But you have to be ready for it and you have to try to get it. Which means taking a mess-load of photos. That’s exactly what I did with this camel photo (which, I agree with my mom, is pretty cool). I took so many photos trying to get the one I wanted I thought my dessert dune bashing group was going to leave me by myself in the no-wheres of the Abu Dhabi desert. But I saw a photo in this funny group of camels and I wanted it, so I waited and kept trying…

And I got it. Well, I got a version of it. Which is another thing I’ve learned about photography. Or maybe more about myself. I don’t get the photo I see in my head. If I’m lucky and wait it out (and keep trying new things) I get something close to what I saw in my head.

This is also true of cooking. I’ve never made a single thing that turned out the way I thought it would. Not exactly. Sometimes it’s better (sushi). Occasionally it’s far far worse (corn curry). But it’s never exactly what I thought it would be, especially if my imagination and expectation is based on a photograph in a magazine or cookbook. But in teaching myself to cook, I’ve learned the same thing that photography has taught me in another way. If you see a dish you want, you make it. You don’t worry about it, you just make it. And when it doesn’t come out, you try it again, differently, until you get a version of what you imagined.

Cheers.

From “The Tao Of Poker” by Larry W. Phillips:

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.

We’ve taken to Texas Hold’um in our house like kids to soda pop. Poker is a fascinating game. If you play it to learn, it teaches you all kinds of things about your nature, and fast. Rule 79 from Larry Phillips oft-recommended book of poker philosophy sums up the nut of pretty much every human problem – the self. What’s great about playing poker to learn this is that instead of just trying to get control over ourselves by holding on to a bunch of facile sayings (“you’re your own worst enemy,” “get out of your own way,” “the only thing stopping you is you,” etc.), we get to experience what these things actually mean in a completely personal way. Only you can really know how you get in your own way, and playing poker can teach you exactly how you do it.**

I can’t recommend the book or the game enough. You can play online (which won’t give you the real experience of playing with other people, but it’s a start) with play chips. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about who you really are, try playing a few rounds and see how you feel. If it doesn’t do anything for you, you won’t have lost anything but a few hours and there’s always therapy.

Cheers.

* Yes, I missed yesterday. I have no (good) excuse.
** If you’re wondering what the hell this has to do with baking and cooking, it doesn’t really. Except that it does. Just play a few games and maybe you’ll see what I mean.