Food Envy

Look what I just got in the mail:

Shirley O. Corriher's  BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking. Corriher is a chemist turned chef, and her books give you the recipes for awesome food and the reasons why awesome food happens. I love Good Eats for the same reason: when I read BakeWise, I don't just get more recipes, I get a little bit closer to knowing how food works and being able to modify recipes on my own. And, as you know, chemistry is cool.

I'm sixty pages in (yes, I'm actually reading a cookbook through!), and I want to stop and make something every time a turn the page. I want to try these recipes out and make them mine. I want to put my new knowledge about baking powder and bundt pans to the test!

In other news, I desperately want to know how to make Indian food. Charlie and I went to India Palace last night, which is my favorite restaurant ever in terms of pure deliciousness. I could eat their food every night for a month and never get tired of it. (Of course, I'll never know that for a fact because it's way too expensive to eat there every night for a month!)

Indian food seems so simple: as far as I can tell, it's only tomatoes and onions cooked down into a paste and flavored with a blend of spices (most of which can be found in American spice racks). So, really, it's not so different from Italian tomato sauces except for its consistency, its spices, and its pairing with rice instead instead of pasta.

But, for the most part, I'm baffled as to how it's made! I've never found a recipe that actually turns out to be anywhere near as amazing as the stuff you can get at a good Indian restaurant. I don't know if it's the spices or my technique. It's a mystery to me, that cooking of banal ingredients into something that makes me groan with gluttonous delight.

So, I have food envy: I want to know how to calculate fantastic cake recipes, and I want to know how to make mind-bendingly good chana masala. Just a few more items to add to my long list of life goals!