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Intimidation overcome


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Yogurt.

I'm not scared of bread, or icecream, or souffles, or stock. But yogurt?

Making yogurt totally intimidated me. I put it off for years, even after acquiring a garage-sale yogurt maker (glass cups w heater, basically).

Made it once with and once without the special gadget. Still seemed too hard. And then the third batch and it all clicked. Now its weekly, and done on autopilot, and its hard to remember feeling intimidated by it.

What was it for you?

"You dont know everything in the world! You just know how to read!" -an ah-hah! moment for 6-yr old Miss O.

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Baking, sharpening.

This is my skillet. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My skillet is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it, as I must master my life. Without me my skillet is useless. Without my skillet, I am useless. I must season my skillet well. I will. Before God I swear this creed. My skillet and myself are the makers of my meal. We are the masters of our kitchen. So be it, until there are no ingredients, but dinner. Amen.

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With me, it was definitely bread. Mostly it was because of all the work that went into a product that could not be fixed if something was done wrong. There is nothing worse than spending days making something only for it to be inedible or even just blah. Now it doesn't intimidate me so much (though I do ocassionally end up with a sub par product that I spent days on).

Edited by BadRabbit (log)
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Souffle, of any type. I don't know that I was intimidated by them, but when I finally got around to trying to make one, it was a revelation how easy they are. Any idiot with a mixer (or just a strong wrist) can make a souffle.

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Mayonnaise. Never had success until I tried it in a small, 3-cup KitchenAid processor. Now I can make it with my eyes closed.

And yeast doughs, bread, pizza, sweet doughs, brioche.

--Roberta--

"Let's slip out of these wet clothes, and into a dry Martini" - Robert Benchley

Pierogi's eG Foodblog

My *outside* blog, "A Pound Of Yeast"

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Canning. I was certain I would poison all of my family and friends. I decided to approach it like a research project (my MO since grad school with pretty much everything) and now my garage is lined with pretty jars that look like a jewelry store. Strangely, I was never afraid of puff pastry, yogurt, bread baking or pretty much anything else.

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The sauté pan flippy thing.

"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

"...in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming...there was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it. It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok."  -Neil Stephenson, author, in The Atlantic

 

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer

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I'm embarrassed to admit this because it was so silly: making caramel. I was terrified of doing it for years because I was convinced I'd burn the house down (because I would make the caramel too dark and then it would start to smoke and catch fire. I didn't say this was logical thinking but there you are.) The first time I actually tried it and it worked, I called a friend in California who knew I was scared of making it - and as luck would have it, they had just experienced a small earthquake!

Now I make caramel two or three times a week because our best selling tart right now is a chocolate caramel tart....

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Paella. I thought it was some sort of clinical wizardry timing thing. Now I can make it for upwards of 50 people without worrying at all.

There are 3 kinds of people in this world, those who are good at math and those who aren't.

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Lighting a match or a lighter.

Not kidding: When I went off to uni., I'd somehow managed to get along for seventeen years without ever having to light match, and suddenly, I was living in a flat that had an old stove with burners that needed to be lit each time you turned them on. After hunger drove me to attempt this, I let it go for about a month (shaking hand + flinging the lit match from you as soon as it light does not make for a lit burner) before trying again. I think it was at least several months before I could firmly strike a match without my hands shaking. Only my desire to experiment with cooking meat (vegetarian family, so I'd never done that before, either) made me persist.

Nothing else has seriously intimidated me, unless I've had to deliver results for someone else (which still makes me anxious).

Michaela, aka "Mjx"
Manager, eG Forums
mscioscia@egstaff.org

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For this former vegetarian - cooking meat. Then yesterday I found myself fluently sauteing multiple animals and improvising a pan sauce and saying, "huh - guess I got it now!"

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