Day 7: Damn, it's already May!

I'm too ADD (or ADHD) for a blog. Seester creeped around and found my blog. She's seriously such a pro stalker, it's somewhat worrying. Anyway, her only comment was that I sounded bored. I replied with, "My blog is boring?? Or do you think I'm so bored that I started this blog?" Apparently, it was the latter. I do hope that doesn't translate into a boring blog, though.

Well today, I'm about to sit down to a lunch of leftovers. I have so many things to say since my last post was awhile ago. Yet, I can't figure what to talk about because I honestly don't think anyone reads this, and I don't think any of it is interesting or important enough to write about. But I can always relay on my good ol' friend, food :]

I'm currently letting my naan dough rise. Yes, I'm making lovely naan bread! And hopefully, I can make some curry to go with it. Otherwise, it'll be an easy pizza dough to top with marinara and cheese :] Oh, how I love college "cooking" and versatility!

But first, a shameless plug for Metro's new blog! After linking him to my blog, I apparently inspired him to start his own! He's getting lotsa experience taking photos everywhere and wanted a place to spill all those crazy thoughts and gorgeous photos. So there it is, my shameless plug for a dear friend.

Oh, and he's looking for a model for a photoshoot. I'd freaking love to do it. And if I do, I can check ONE thing off my bucket list! YAY! He's thinking something messy like flour :] Dude, I'm down. I wanna try paint. Hee!

Alright, onto the naan!

So this is the recipe I stumbled across long ago. I finally went out and bought plain yogurt. Shit. I just realized that I bought whole milk yogurt. Oops. Well, this follows the whole "never-follow-the-recipe" thing I do. And I didn't quite put enough yeast. Hee.

Alright, here is the milk-sugar-yeast broth. It smelled awful, but I made me smile to think that I was creating a little utopia for little yeasties to thrive, with warm milk to swim around in and sugar to eat. And then I'd bake them to death after having them slave away make my dough rise! Buahahaha!

Here's my set up. One day, I'll have a nice recipe book instead of my laptop. Or maybe not, since we're moving in the direction of replacing all paper mediums! Stinkin' Kindle! I'll never give up my lovely books. I'm going to have a massive library, bigger than the Library of Alexandria, to save all the world's books! It'll be magical.

Wet ingredients. Dry ingredients. Ew, mixing the egg, yogurt, and olive oil into the smelly yeastie broth was gross. I could just imagine some shy kid having to drink a nasty concoction like that as some frat pledge activity (AKA hazing). "Hey, you gotta drink this, jump into the creek, and swim to the other side. Then streak across campus; make sure to run in front of all the sorority houses. We'll laugh and take pictures. If you do it, you can join our frat and be our bitch." Hmmm sounds good!

Ha, anyway, PRESTO. Mix wet and dry together. I got this awful-looking crumbly mix. Um… that DOES NOT look like dough!

So I poured a splash of milk in. Then some more milk. And even more. WTF. Finally, I got something that held together well enough. I kneaded it

Covered it and let it rise for an hour. Then kneaded it some more. God, this bread is so KNEADY! What more do you want from meeeee?? I just want some damn naan! Oh, so I realized: "Hell, I don’t know how to knead bread!" But I DO know how to knead CLAY. From a ceramics class last summer. So I kneaded it like clay. Granted, it didn't act like clay at all, I tried. Then I let it sit and rise again. And boy, did it rise! It actually felt like dough, all soft and lovely. That's more like it.

So the recipe told me to put my oven on the highest temp possible. Um, seriously? Will my oven explode? That sounds too scary. Roomie told me to just set it on a lower temp and bake it for a bit longer. But the bake time is only 3 minutes. Well, I'm gonna take the plunge. 550 degrees it is!

And voila! Here are the first two prototypes!

They seemed pretty thick and hefty, so I tried to get the second two thinner. But they turned out just as dense.

And it has the consistency of dense bread. So not naan. Semi-success. Even though it's not quite like naan, and my entire apartment (and probably the whole building now, too) smells like burnt something, the product is edible! I think I kneaded it too much. I've heard that working the dough too much does that. Turns out that I'm the kneady one! Or maybe it's all that extra milk I had to add to make the dough not crumbly. ONE DAY, I SHALL CONQUER BREAD. But today, I shall be munching on dense "naan."

Same as my pie. Oh, yes, I never told you the outcome of my first pie! Well, it was so deceiving, how perfect it looked and how wonderful it smelled. The next day, I finally tried it, and it was sorta awful. Something about the balance of spices and tastes was completely off. I couldn't taste the pear AT ALL, and the nutmeg was too strong. Roomie thought the spices were okay, but she agreed that baking with pears is quite different from baking with apples. Apparently, you need to be more delicate with pears, so I suppose throwing in a bunch of other spices that the recipe didn't call for was NOT the right thing to do, even though it seemed "natural" and very "professional baker." Oh, a dash of this and a pinch of that! Not so much...

I totally overestimate my baking skills.

But the BF and Metro will be baking with me all summer, so perhaps I shall learn a thing or two :]

Speaking of summer, I've just started my spring semester, which actually goes til the end of July. I'm super sad that I pretty much don't have long summer breaks anymore! Mawry will be at mountain camp all summer :[ I'm not sure what KiKi and EmBem are doing. LSay is moving to the East Coast for good. Ack! Tragedy! But at least, I have a functional oven at school. Yeeee! Oh, the silver lining :]