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.

When I made my first pie, I was about ten. I never really liked pie but for some reason, in the grocery store with my step-mother, I announced that I wanted an apple pie, thinking of pre-packaged Hostess thing with the green and white wrapper and super sugary shell coating. Instead of buying me one of those, she bought me the ingredients for a homemade apple pie and we went home and we made it. I was a relative stranger to the kitchen – cooking was not one of those arts that was really passed down to me the way it is in some families and I don’t remember anyone really enjoying preparing meals. Both my mothers fed us, to be sure, but meals were…more functional than anything else, and preparing them was not a group activity. So making this pie was kind of a big deal, and, unbeknownst to me, a little stressful for my step-mom. I was blissfully ignorant of how difficult pie making can be, but she was not, and she feared that my first pie might…turn out really bad.

Miraculously, it was not. In fact, it was the exact opposite of really bad. It was perfect. Including the homemade crust. Perfect. Without really trying, I somehow managed to make a perfect butter crust. I had no idea what I was doing. And I think that was the key – I had no experience in this area and no one had ever told me how hard it was to do what I was doing, so it wasn’t.

Since then I’ve made a lot of pie and almost all of them have been pretty close to perfect. I don’t mean to say that I haven’t had pie far better than the pie I make. Without a doubt I have. But generally speaking, whatever I put in the oven comes out well. My husband says this is because I love to eat, and he’s right. I am highly motivated to cook because I love to eat and I love the whole process of eating – starting with finding the (hopefully new) thing to make, writing the list, doing the shopping (especially if it involves a specialty market I’ve never been to), bringing it home, cleaning, chopping, preparing pans, measuring, mixing, cooking and, finally, setting something beautiful and delicious in front of someone else, and myself, and eating. This is the perfect way to spend an entire weekend – simply cooking.

I have never wanted to make a career out of cooking and I still don’t now. I love cooking and would no sooner be paid to do it than I’d be paid to love people. That doesn’t make sense to me. What I love to get paid for is forming teams, project management, and culture building. I’ve done this all my life, most recently in the service of movies, because I love being on a team with a common goal that is important to all of us and movies, almost as much as eating, have been a huge part of my life. Now that I’m in business school, though, I realize the need to “specialize,” to find my “USP”…to figure out how I’m going to stand out from this teaming mass of other educated, talented and unemployed people. And as I was sitting in a seminar yesterday morning, listening to people who had been in business a long time, telling me once again that I needed to specialize it hit me; food. Of course. Food. You love food. You don’t have to cook it. You just have to sell it. You just have to be on a team that sells food and loves it as much as you do. And in fact, I can’t think of a better way to spend my days than around other people who love food. Not artisans, not chefs – that’s private to me and for intimate moments at home. But I can sell Lean Cuisine. Or I can sell PF Changs. Or I can sell Tootsie Rolls. I can sell any of it. Just the same as I sold SAW IV and I sold IRON MAN and I sold LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. I can sell food.

Finally, a focus.

Cheers.

Yes, I did fall off the earth. Fell right off and landed in Glendale, AZ where I will spend the next year in hot pursuit of an MBA in Global Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Picking up student life where I left off almost 20 years ago is strange and new enough, but just to liven things up a bit more, I’m living in the dorms. While that does mean invitations to parties where people play things like “tip cup,” it also means that I have no consistent access to a kitchen. My new friend Leona has offered to lend me hers every once in a while and, if I find the time in the madness that is the accelerated MBA program here, I will mosey over there and try to get in a Daring Challenge or two over the year. But the blog is officially on hiatus until I return again to my home and kitchen, where the husband diligently holds down the fort.

Hopefully I’ll be able to check in between now and the end of 2010, but regardless of how much time I am able to spend here, all the Daring cookers and bakers will be in my thoughts.

Until 2011 (or maybe a little sooner)!

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.

I could have sworn HP has been around forever, but apparently it’s “contemporary sauce.” I’ll try to get a photo of the “local special meat sausage” tomorrow.

Cheers.