An (overtly) lengthy background to my baking/cooking history

So. As an introduction: one of my most treasured memories (because it was so devastatingly funny to my friends) is when I tried to make chocolate chip cookies from scratch on my own one college day when I was attending University of California Santa Cruz as an Ecology & Evolution major. I don't know what I did – either doubled baking powder or baking soda… or forgot to put either in altogether, but I ended up with a pan of melted cookie goop (see how upset I was in the photo?). Don't worry, my roommates and I still did right by the ingredients and ate what we could. But after this moment I realized I couldn't bake without strict supervision.

5 years ago: Yes my hair was short. No it's not anymore. Yes it was awesome. Growing it out was not.

“What about cooking?” you may ask. Cooking was different – if I didn't put enough salt, I could add more later! If I hadn't cooked the chicken thoroughly, I could throw it back in the pan! Cooking was MADE for mistakes, in my opinion. It's how we find out new things that are delicious (or things to never ever ever try again). Whereas screwing up baked things... you usually can't fix whatever went wrong after the creature is already baked.

After graduating from UCSC in 2009, I had a “gap year” (please google 'gap year' and watch some hilarious videos of how the youths in England view the practice). I lived with my dad and applied to roughly a million jobs. I finally got a non-paid internship (welcome to the real world and the crash, people!), and moved to Massachusetts for the winter and ‘spring.’ Hell. No. I’m from CA, people! If I want winter, I go to the mountains!

Anyway, there was so much time being huddled inside the house the other interns and I decided to each cook for a night of the week. It was awesome! The lead cook picked what we were going to make, and the rest of us (a total of 4 interns) acted as sous (assistant) chefs and dishwashers. We got pretty good at this! This helped me on the road towards becoming a much better cook. Cooking had become… fun! And delicious!

I got accepted to a Masters program at Duke University after this, concentrating on coastal environmental management at the Nicholas School of the Environment. Guess what state Duke University is in. Go ahead!

…

North Carolina! I know, I didn't realize it either since I don't watch basketball. So off I went with the skill set to continue cooking some delicious things. I started getting more adventurous and began looking up different recipes than my old stand-bys. This was dangerous, as new recipes meant (generally) more complicated instructions than I was used to. Mistakes were made! But nothing lit on fire, and we were all (happily) pretty surprised by what was coming out of my kitchen. I started caring more about what ingredients I was using, trying to find local fresh ingredients over organic (or not) imported ingredients.

Every now and then I'd try my hand at baking, but it wasn't until I got a bread maker (this enormous clunky wonderful bread machine) that I carefully approached baking once again. I could just dump all the ingredients into the bread maker and it did it all for me! Mistakes were still made (e.g. I halved the recipe, forgot I halved the recipe, and added too much flour), but besides one onion powder loaf incident, no one got sick. And now I (mostly) make bread by hand. And I have my own sourdough culture!

After this I started making SWEET POTATO PIES. This sweet potato pie recipe in particular is a favorite. But I stayed away from making my own pie crust. It terrified me. But I thought I’d give cookies a try again! And quick breads! And it snowballed from there.

At this time my best friend (let’s just abbreviate her title to BFF, otherwise it will get annoying for you to read best friend a million times and for me to write it a million times... because it will be that many times) started sending me all these amazing delicious recipes from (you guessed it) Pinterest.

I had decided to hate Pinterest at this point. You will soon learn this is very 'Dani.' If everyone thinks this one thing is awesome and cool and I HAVE TO TRY IT… I won't. I will resist. For 2 years. And I did! I finally gave in a few months ago and my life has never been the same.

I've also begun gardening, because BFF started to. I moved next to an old friend from highschool and SHE has a garden too – and loves to cook/bake! There's lots of produce around, and I often look up recipes to figure out how to use it in the most delicious way possible. This is why BFF suggested I start a blog… but also to stop torturing/irritating all my friends on Facebook (sorry guys!).

Well. That was far too long of an introductory post, but there you go. Basically what I'm saying is that YOU TOO CAN COOK AND BAKE LIKE ME AND STILL HAVE A SEMI-NORMAL LIFE!

Now I’m going to start looking back at all the good photos I have of delicious things I've made and get some more photos and stories on the Cooking Lair (explanation of blog name to come).