Today was the first day, I followed a baking recipe and I am so happy that it turned out to be tasty.
To be honest, I have done baking before. The first things I baked in my life were fish and chicken- following recipes sent by my mother on the phone or by email. My mother did a lot of baking when I was a child- the happiest memories of my life consist of licking the wooden spatula containing the baking mix of flour, eggs, sugar and vanilla. However, I had always felt that I could never succeed in baking a cake or quiche well in the oven. Thus till today, I had confined myself to baking fish or chicken or roasting veggies.
This holiday, we decided to have a meal with a friend of Sonya, named L and her family, who live across the street. Now L is a great cook with a great sense of style- whenever I eat something she makes, I am always amazed by the taste. I felt that with the invitation to her house, I wanted to contribute something original and fun. Because Sonya is vegetarian it rules out non-veg recipes. I did not want to do my usual fall-back option of cooking lentils. Why not try something new?
Luckily for me, the choice was made easy by me thinking about food that I would like to eat for a holiday meal, and settled for two things, which I have purchased and eaten at bakeries: chocolate chip bread and quiches. I make bread regularly in a bread machine, and even had one random loaf of bread where I added chocolate chips and sunflower seeds to the dough -just to be naughty; and it turned out to be yummy. I figured, with a recipe, I could certainly beat this baseline. And on occasion, when cooking an omelette I have whisked the eggs in a blender, and added spinach, in a cast iron pan, and cooked it slowly, and found that the result tasted almost like a quiche. How much harder would it be to have a crust, and follow the recipe and see if I could replicate bakery results in my own kitchen?
I did a little research on the internet over the past week, and at first was overwhelmed by the number of options spat out by google. I decided to try the third or fourth link, from a website that did not look like something from a nameless machine, but belonged to an individual.
Spinach and Cheese Quiche:
from http://www.onceuponachef.com/2010/09/spinach-quiche.html
I was lucky to find a quiche I liked- only visually- because the other senses cannot be downloaded from the internet. I went to the about section, and found that the person who wrote the blog had worked as a chef, and spent time abroad in France learning the art of cooking. I also read the reviews of the recipe, and was happy to note that almost all of them were positive. The blog author, Jenn Segal, responded intelligently to questions like "Can I make it without the crust?" or "Can I freeze and serve later?", and she took her own photos, and the quiche looked spectacular. I followed her recipe, and voila, the quiche I made looked just like the one on her blog, and it tasted as delectable as it looked. (Kudos to L for aesthetic table settings with a warm candle surrounded by fallen maple leaves on a square frame for the centerpiece of the table.)
The quiche was not difficult to make, even if we made the one mis-step of forgetting to prick the crust before baking it in the oven. We rectified it by pricking it 8 minutes into its 15 minute baking. Also, it appeared that the cream and egg-mixture when standing in the tall blender, which would form the filling for the quiche, would be more voluminous than the capacity of the pie-crust- but it filled the crust exactly- demonstrating how humans are bad at estimating the volume of liquids in a tall container compared to a shallow and wide container.
Chocolate Chip Banana Walnut Bread
From: http://portandfin.com/chocolate-chip-banana-walnut-bread/
For the chocolate chip bread, I was tempted to try a recipe from the same website as the quiche, but I decided to spread my bets, by trying a recipe from a different website. I chanced upon another elegant website, titled, portandfin.com. I loved the clear instructions from the website, and the appealing pictures. I was not disappointed with the moist bread (though I reduced the amount of sugar used to a third!)
Digging into a green-salad made by L.
From http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2011/02/green-bean-salad-with-pickled-red-onions-and-fried-almonds/ . The beans were blanched perfectly, and were crunchy and utterly fresh and delectable.
Final Thoughts
Visual-sense dominating the others
In the internet age, I am as guilty as most other people of being attracted to something that looks visually appealing. There are probably, a number of recipes out there which are equally good, but I would not be tempted to make them without a visual prompt of how the final product is going to look like.
Buzz Factor and Book Sales
Jenn Segal (onceuponachef.com) - Quiche recipe- mentions on her blog about her dream of writing a book and becoming a famous author and making enough money from passion for cooking.
Deb Perelman ( smittenkitchen.com) - green-bean salad - has already made it. She had a blog for years, and had her book published in 2013. (The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook). She has already had her book tour and hopefully, her book is doing well.
I am thinking about the writings of Malcolm Gladwell, and the BBC Podcast called Thinking Allowed and Nicholas Naseem Taleb, when I think of why one person may be unsuccessful, while the other person is a hit. In 19th century France, there were a number of authors who wrote as well as Balzac who never got published (from Taleb). What is the tipping point for an author to be successful? Is it a small random difference in the initial start which makes a difference in the final outcome? That authors go on book tours- not because the sales from each author talk event make it profitable- but the only hope of having a super-hit book , out of the approximately 5000 books published each year in the USA, is that the buzz factor from the talk, might be the tipping point which avalanches book-sales.
Reptilian Brain and Nostalgia.
Smell. Flavor.
The direct pathway to the reptilian brain.
Vanilla. Flour. Egg. Sugar.
Or all four of the above in the BATTER?
Which transported me to my childhood today.
Cloudy but joyful memories swirling in my head.
Of hanging out near my mother while she was baking.
Of imagining the milky way in the double-spiral dough in the mixing bowl.
Of licking the spatula clean.
Of peering into the oven
- willing the dough to rise above the baking dish at a pace visible to the naked eye.
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