Crazy Cooking

Last time I was in Berlin, I cooked and baked bread about once a week. While I was staying at the Forth's house, I cooked a few times, but cooking stopped once I moved into res. I joked to Isabel that I needed to cook something soon because I was going through withdrawal. So, once I got back to Berlin, I not only cooked dinner but I also baked a loaf of bread. Considering that my other achievements for the day were getting up, playing four hours of Wii, and taking an hour-long bath, you'd think I was making up for the months spent in Vancouver.

I've noticed that the more I cook, the more I enjoy cooking, which isn't true for baking. I've helped my mom bake since I was about eight, and with a good recipe I can bake everything except complicated cakes and pastry. If I bake a batch of muffins, if I bake them again it'll probably take me slightly less time. If I cook a dish, when I go to make it again I can add new ingredients, change the way things were cooked, and the result is much improved. With bread it's a similar story- I can make a more complicated type of bread, or improve one I've made before. The fact that cooking is a lot more variable than baking is why I think I much prefer to cook than bake.

My cooking has also come a long way in the past ten years. When I was nine, I watched a TV show where they made crepe, and I decided I wanted to give it a try. I didn't ask someone older to help me, but luckily my brother happened to be around, and when he came into the kitchen he did not find me lightly frying a thin crepe like they had on TV, but rather I was deep-frying a solid mass of batter. He added milk to the batter and showed me how to spread the batter around, and crepe became my dish. Until I was 17, my repertoire consisted mainly of crepe and scrambled eggs, and I'm still considered the expert on cooking crepe, even though my dad and brother can probably cook them just as well. When my dad moved away for a year, my mom started asking me to cook occasionally, and by now I can cook quite a bit.

Although I can cook, my attempts at improvisation have consistently failed. My first attempt, at age 11, was to liven up a tomato soup I'd prepared, and so I added a bit of every spice on the spice rack- about 20 in total- stirred it all together, and took a sip. I still think it would have tasted fine until I added a heaping teaspoon of steak seasoning, but the final product was disgusting. I had to throw the whole pot of soup away, and I ended up eating a peanut butter sandwich, which was a much safer meal. For me, spicing up my food is equivalent to ruining it. But I still occasionally decide I want to try something new, which is why I ate fried bread for lunch.

I actually had fried potatoes and onions for lunch, and since I'd eaten something edible I decided to risk something inedible. Fried potatoes are great- they're the best thing you can do with old boiled potatoes, and with some scrambled eggs with fried potatoes and onions is a great meal. So I thought that maybe fried bread would be okay. My thinking was along the lines of "This might be crazy enough to work." And, in fact, bread fried in bacon fat served with eggs is delicious, and my dad makes it when he decides we need more saturated fat in our diets. I was going to try frying bread in oil to see if it tasted good. Served with the potatoes and onions, it tasted pretty good, considering that all the meal had was starch and oil.

I wasn't done experimenting yet, though. First I tried a piece fried in olive oil instead of rapeseed oil, but I added way too much oil and it was barely edible. Then, since the bread had so far seemed a little dry, I added some water before frying it. The hissing and snapping from the water was pretty cool, but I ended up with bread that was chewy, oily, and doughy, none of which are desirable properties in my mind. I was also pretty tired of fried bread by now. I tried toasting a piece and then lightly frying it, which was very disappointing. First of all, toasted bread tastes way better than fried bread, and secondly it didn't fry very evenly after toasting. Finally, I added beer while it was frying, and I had high hopes for this piece, because beer is tasty, and beer in bread is often quite tasty too. Although frying beer is really cool to watch, the beer-fried bread was, unsurprisingly, not very good.

In the end, frying bread is a waste of time, especially considering that toast is quite tasty. I had fun messing around with bread, though, and I think that the next time I make bruschetta, I'll probably lightly fry the bread in olive oil, because on its own the olive oil piece was actually pretty good, if way too oily. I also got my annual dose of experimentation, so I won't be trying anything crazy until I come back to Berlin next summer.