It’s not a Disney movie but it feels just as magical!  After two years of photographing everything for the blog with a point and shoot, Bake Like A Ninja finally has a decent DSLR camera.

Since it’s spring, a baby sprout coming up seemed fitting for the very first picture from the new camera on the blog.  It’s a jalapeño sprout, which we hope will add depth to our food  and keep it interesting and spicy.  I’m hoping the camera will do the same thing for the blog.

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.

- Let it get to room temperature before adding it to a hot pan
- If you need to stir in anything before cooking, do so gently and in one direction (clockwise or counterclockwise)
- If possible, add the yogurt off heat (you could also deglaze the pan to loosen the cooked yumminess, which will bring the temperature down a bit)
- Temper the yogurt in one/both of the following ways:

• Add flour (there are many kinds of flour used in Indian cooking like Atta (whole hard wheat), Maida (highly refined wheat, similar to cake flour), or Besan (chickpea)) or corn starch – about 1 tsp per one cup of yogurt being used
• Take about a tablespoon of the hot liquid or ingredients from the pan you are cooking in (the pan you will be adding the yogurt to) and carefully add it to your room temperature yogurt.  Mix slowly and add enough of the hot liquid or ingredients to heat the yogurt.  The idea is that you are slowly and gently heating the yogurt up to prepare it to be added to the heat, so you don’t shock it from cool to hot.  Think of this the same way you would an egg – if you put a beaten cold egg directly on a hot pan, you’ll get a scrambled egg.  If you warm the beaten egg up slowly and gently with hot liquid, it will stay liquid and can be incorporated into other things as a liquid instead of a solid.  Once the yogurt is closer to the heat of the food in the pan, you can add it.

Or, you can use this recipe for “pre-tempering” yogurt (taken directly and completely from www.indiacurry.com):

1. Whole-milk plain yogurt: 1 Quart
2. Large egg white, lightly beaten: 1
3. Cornstarch: 1 Tablespoon
4. Salt: 1 teaspoon

Mix all ingredients together in a heavy saucepan. Whisk. Cook over moderate heat, stirring, in one direction until mixture starts to bubble and comes to a boil (approximately 8 minutes). Reduce heat to moderately low, and simmer until thickened, it will take approximately additional 4  minutes.  Stabilized yogurt can be stored in the refrigerator for 2 weeks.

I can safely say that warming the yogurt with part of the dish we were cooking, in combination with adding some cornstarch worked wonders.  The sauce was excellent.  We haven’t tried the stabilizing recipe yet, but will do so soon and report back.  I will hazard a guess, though, and say that I think bringing the yogurt up to room temperature, stabilized or not, is always a good idea.

Hope that is helpful in your cooking adventures – Indian food is amazing, as well as easy, and hopefully this tip makes it just a little bit easier!

Also – if you’re interested in making your own yogurt (which I just tried yesterday and highly recommend), check out How To Make Yogurt.  I’ll put up a full post on homemade yogurt after I play with the recipe a bit more.

Cheers.

I promised more “real” and more photos on the blog so…above is about as real as I get and here are some photos.

Getting ready to make individual pizza crusts in the bathroom

Little future pizzas!

People ask me a lot how I manage here, so far away from home and so far away from the husband.  Honestly, part of what keeps me sane is my nightly meal, which I eat very often with him, “on the google” (as his grandfather likes to call google video chating).  The first picture is my bathroom, which is the only place with enough counter space to really do any cooking, so consequently it’s the place where I roll out dough for single serving pizzas that I make in a toaster oven, right before I call home at night.  It’s comforting to be able to make something that is close to one of our favorite things to eat at home.  And between being able to make something, talking to my man and a little red wine,  it always feels like a treat.

Cheers.