Starting with the cake, my luck started to change. Before, the best I could do for myself was making rice (in a rice cooker), and grilling chicken or salmon on a household grill. I could cook pasta on a stovetop, but when I tried to heat up the sauce, it exploded in my microwave. I’ve even messed up sunny-side up eggs by dumping half a shaker of pepper on it. I tried to salvage it, but alas the damage was done and my breakfast was ruined. :(

But I persisted. I tried making French Toast a few weeks ago, and the result was not-terrible. I baked at a banana cake for the TEAM Christmas Party Potluck and it was so good, people went back for seconds, thirds and even fifths! The next project was spanakopita … although I was really just a sous-chef this time around. It didn’t look difficult and I think I could even do it again unsupervised. It turned out so good that drunk people eating it a week later said it was delicious (and didn’t get sick)!

This week I’ve noticed a definite improvement. I made pasta again and the sauce didn’t explode. I made a stir-fry without so much as vague oral instructions, and it turned out pretty well!

Now I need to figure out how to put some planning into my food-making, so that I can have leftovers and actually eat them before they go bad … :-o

When asked what she wanted for her birthday, Bridget said, “Bake me a cake.” She bought me a beginner’s cookbook as part of my birthday present, so it seems only fitting that I should cook something from it. I ambitiously chose the Sunken Chocolate Cake, if only because the description in the cookbook read “ridiculously easy to make”. Also, because it had very few, simple ingredients: chocolate, butter, eggs, and sugar. No flour or anything fancy like that.

Luckily I had two good friends (Josh and Morgan) supervise me. They helped improvise a Double Boiler to melt the chocolate and butter in, and with beating the eggs. I was a little intimated by the egg beating, since I’m still traumatized by the last experience. No less than 40 minutes later, the cake emerged, and it actually looked like a cake!

Here’s a picture of it with icing sugar on top:

Lessons learned:

• Icing sugar and “confectioner’s sugar” are interchangeable terms.
• “Whipped Cream” and “Whipping Cream” are not. (Many thanks to Morgan for trying to help me improvise an icing).
• If you give Bridget a cake that tastes delicious, she’ll raise the bar and expect more next time.

My contribution to the potluck was supposed to be Baked Alaska, which I saw on the geekified cooking show/podcast Ctrl+Alt+Chicken. (I suggest downloading the episode if you want to see what it’s like – the show’s great).

Little did I realise just how ambitious this project was. Baked Alaska seems relatively simple … you take shortcake, cover it with vanilla ice cream, cover that with raspberry sherbet, and then cover the whole thing with meringue icing and shove it the oven. See, egg whites are a thermal insulator, so they prevent the ice cream from melting while it’s in the oven. It’s supposed to be pretty awesome.

Anyway… the shortcake ice-cream part was simple enough. We had something like six people trying to beat the egg whites though, and after two hours with no meringue we gave up and declared the experiment a failure.

Apparently, there are a number of factors that go into making a successful meringue, that none of us could’ve thought of. For example, the weather is a factor:

If it is humid or raining outside, sometimes you won’t get the proper volume no matter what you do.

It was raining all day, and humidity was at 100%.

When whipping egg whites, always start your mixer on medium-low to medium speed.

Oops.

Beating, stirring and jarring can break down the foam.

Well … what the hell? How do you beat egg whites if beating them breaks it down??

They didn’t mention any of these factors on Ctrl+Alt+Chicken … Mind you, they’re geeks – not chefs – but maybe they should get a supervisor or something to make sure little tips like that get out!

I always figured that cooking and baking was just like following an algorithm – you follow the instructions and stuff happens. But it’s NOT!

Now Harley has a half-made Baked Alaska in his freezer.

Still, great party!

I’ve been googling around for some cooking lessons, but it seems that everything starts with stuff like “How to shop for vegetables,” or “How to chop things properly” and other pre-requisite lessons. Going through those things, I’ll be lucky if I come up with something edible by the time I turn 30. I’m hungry now, and I want instant gratification. One website pointed me to a book called the Kitchen Survival Guide, which was described as “for the true beginner, the person who has never cooked at all; who doesn’t know how to clean a kitchen sponge or whether ketchup should be stored in the fridge.” Sounds like it’s for me! (Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t seem to actually carry it, and by the time it got here I would’ve already starved to death).

Last time I posted about cooking, a lot of people gave me some suggestions and recipes, but I don’t think I have all those ingredients (I don’t even think I have chicken at the moment) – Angelo’s was downright confusing! I’ve decided what I need is the cooking equivalent of “Hello, World”: Something that you can get up and running in no time at all. It doesn’t do much, but at least it’s something.

Cooking for Engineers doesn’t really help, since they don’t really give any indication of where to start, and I don’t know what half the things listed on that site are. There needs to be a “Cooking to get food now: for totally useless people” resource.

Update: I realized something while toasting a bagel and putting peanut butter on it: Cooking requires a lot of forethought. You need to plan in advance what you intend on eating in the future and then go out, buy the ingredients necessary, and defend them from your housemates until such a time as you are ready to prepare and cook them. I don’t have the facilities for forethought. I can’t even think ahead a few minutes, let alone days.

So it’s time to start learning some cooking basics. I need to be able to make some handy, quick meals that I can eat when I have no money to go out. I suppose I should start with something like pastas, but I’m a little intimidated seeing as how pasta in my house has always been so terrible that until I finally went to Spaggio’s for the first time (like, last year) I thought I just didn’t like pasta. It turns out that spaghetti isn’t supposed to be goopy and slimy and slippery. Who knew?

If anyone has suggestions and pointers of where to start looking please tell me!