Delusional Self Confidence

"Startups rarely die in mid keystroke." Paul Graham 

You just had a killer month. Blew away your goals. Finished that release on time, and under budget. Users raved. Investors glowed. 

If you've been at this awhile, you know what comes next. That whole "up and to the right" thing is a well marketed lie. It goes up, and wiggles, and dives, and goes up again. Get ready for troughs of sorrow, peaks of false hope, and blips too strange to have their own names yet.  

There is nothing like the moment you hit send on a great update to your team or your investors. It's a moment, maybe an hour, of total elation. And then the doubt creeps in. What if I can't beat these numbers next month? What if this success was just a fluke? What if? 

You have a lot of "what if" moments in front of you, and more behind you than you can count. When that fear comes in, I remind myself I can't control the future - but I can sure as hell try. I can decide not to quit, not to die. I can push forward. If startups are "two steps forward and one step back", then I can prepare for a long walk. Because as Paul Graham wisely said, startups rarely die in mid keystroke. 

This year, one of my New Year's resolutions was to start writing again. I love the feeling I get when pouring my thoughts out on paper - it's therapeutic, it's, focusing, it's calming. And it's insanely hard. 

Here we are, April 21st - the 111th day of the year. I could quit. That really seems like the logical thing to do, nearly a 1/3 of the way into the year. I'm a pretty logical person. Yet, I find myself here writing a post.

I find the writing easy, but publishing is hard. Publishing is public; it becomes about something bigger than just you. I know the fears that hold me back: I'll write a few posts and realize that's all the interesting material I have in me. No one will care. Everyone will care. (I'm not sure which is more frightening). I'll over think every post and never hit that 'publish' button. 

I don't have time for fears. I have 1/3 of the year behind me and its time to dig into that delusional self confidence and march forward. 

So, without further ado, today I am launching my personal blog. I am titling it after a phrase that has become a personal rallying point over the past 2 years - Delusional Self Confidence. It's about believing in yourself, even when you're not sure why. It's about pushing yourself farther, not knowing where your limit is. And its about failing - but getting right back up.  

Cleaning Cast Iron 101

How do you clean your cast iron skillet? I wanted to have mine sparkling for Saturday's Chicken Satay recipe. Watch my quick tutorial to learn my secret.

Last night I should have been out on the town. The plan was dinner at one of Danny Meyer's restaurants, such as Union Square Cafe, to celebrate my dad (*cough*and his wallet*) being in town. But alas, fine dining will have to wait. Instead, I cook.

As I've mentioned, I don't cook often. I certainly don't cook anything not found in one of the Giada de Laurentiis' or Mark Bittman's cookbooks. Last night the goal was to cook something not in any of the nearly 30 cookbooks I own. To decide what to cook I asked friends, family, and you my readers - thanks for the advice and encouragement. Eventually I decided to take a leap of faith on Thai food. Chicken Satay is a classic, and one that could be done in my huge NYC apartment kitchen (read: 32 square feet, not exaggerating here - we measured between courses).

A quick stop at Whole Foods provided all the ingredients we would need. At home, Scott and I quickly prepared the chicken marinade - a blend of yogurt, ginger, garlic and curry powder. We placed the chicken strips in the sauce to marinade for 2 hours in the fridge while we watched football (yep, I know my priorities!).

Regarding football, we temporarily pause this recipe to complain about yesterday's UT football game. Really boys? My chicken is marinating, I have a delicious Manhattan in hand (thanks to Scott) and this is the best you can do? Tisk, tisk. Glad that is over so we can go back to the kitchen!

2 hours later and it was time to make the peanut sauce and prep the skewers. For the peanut sauce we blended a mix of peanut butter, soy sauce, chili paste, brown sugar and lime juice in a food processor. With these blended, we added 1/2 cup of hot water, pouring slowly with the food processor running to thin the sauce to a perfect consistency.

Setting the sauce aside, we pulled the chicken out of the fridge to put together the skewers. This might be my favorite part of cooking - messy hands and getting to play with my food. After a remarkably quick process,  it was time to fire up the stove and pull out the cast iron.

Cooking about 3 skewers at a time, I uncovered an important flaw in cooking this recipe without a grill pan. I do not own a grill pan (Mom - on the Christmas list), which is what the recipe calls for. So I turned to my go-to cast iron. As you can see in the pictures the skewers stuck out of the pan, making it difficult to cook the chicken through. We ended up cutting the end of the skewers to solve this problem, which worked much better. As you may have noticed from the pictures, I am a wimp when it comes to heat. The oil splattered quite a bit with every new skewer I added, so I decided to cook with oven mitts on and tongs as fingers - problem solved!

The final product was beautiful, but even more important it was delicious. I decided to serve it over some simple white rice, with lots of extra peanut sauce and soy sauce on the side. A true homemade feast! It looked like a lot of food, but quickly disappeared with the appetite we had worked up in the kitchen.

To go with our feast, I served dinner to Scott and my dad with a Cotes Du Rhone wine I've been waiting to open. While Chicken Satay might traditionally thought of as best paired with white wine, the fruit of the Syrah complimented the dish and brought out the peanut flavor nicely.

After a rest, and some more wine, it was on to dessert - fried bananas. We started with 3 bananas cut in half and a package of spring roll skins. After carefully wrapping each banana, I placed them in about a 1/2 inch of hot oil in a clean cast iron skillet. After turning a few times the skins cooked to a crispy brown, with a soft banana filing. Each piece was served with brown sugar and local honey drizzled on top. While enjoyable, after eating this dish my instinct is to stick to flambeed bananas in the future. The flavor of the cooked fruit was very similar here, but the spring roll skin added more chewy complication than additional flavor. Oh well! 2 recipes - 1 huge success and 1 experiment, not bad odds for a "non-cook".

Thai may be my biggest adventure outside my limited cooking comfort zone so far - and with it one of my best culinary successes. Chicken Satay proved to be a delicious, easy to make dinner for 3 that I will certainly try again. Confidence is boosted, kitchen is starting to look like a kitchen again - what adventure should I tackle next? Let me know your favorite experimental, ethnic recipes and I'll give them a try!

Bonus Selection:

 First, a huge thank you to everyone who read my post on Hill Country Chicken and took the time to vote. It is much appreciated.

 But now for the scary part. I advanced to round 2 (woohoo!), which means I have to cook for the next challenge. As I mentioned in my last post, the kitchen is not my natural habitat. Restaurants yes, kitchen not so much. I had a weekend full of dining out plans, which I'm quickly revamping to cooking in plans.

 The question then becomes what to cook. The prompt asks us to "tackle a classic dish from another culture". That knocks out American, English (sorry Dad), and Hondurian / Latino (sorry Grandma). If I'm being fair to all my various cultural parts it also vetoes German and the internationally acclaimed cuisine of Canada. Plus Italian would just be lazy (sorry Giada). Here is what I am left with as choices:

a) Indian - maybe from the south to mix things up.

b) Australian - not sure what it is, would love to learn.

c) Thai - has always scared me, which is a reason to try in itself.

d) African - because it was great in Philly, but I had no idea what I was eating.

e) Chinese - maybe Dim Sum? pork buns?

I confess, I went to Hill Country Chicken on opening night. Not to see the press and celebrities (there were none, save for Michael White of Marea who is a celeb in my book). Nor for the right to be the first to post a review, because clearly I'm a few days delayed there as well. But instead, because I could not wait one more day to try fried chicken rumored to be as good as what I grew up with in Texas. This, after all, is why I blog.

I would love to say I blog for fame or fortune, but truly I blog because eating is my favorite part of the day. As you've seen, I rarely write about cooking because, to be fair, I don't do much of it. But I do love the restaurant industry. And I love talking about the food, the chefs, the restaurateurs, and all those on staff who make great meals happen. From your corner cafe who really knows their coffee to the Chelsea Market fruit vendor with the best produce in town to Madison Avenue fine dining, I respect the work that goes in to each venture and look forward to exploring new ones each day.

Writing about food may be new to me, but planning my day around it is certainly not. Growing up we would often detour a few hundred miles on a family road trip for the right waffles for breakfast or the best tamales for dinner. Nothing has changed there, so on Wednesday night I found myself standing in line with the crowds at Hill Country. I first heard about the coming of Hill Country Chicken in June after speaking to Elizabeth Karmel at the Big Apple BBQ, one my favorite annual NYC events. I've been tracking their progress ever since, anxiously awaiting the opening.

On Wednesday, I immediately appreciated the limited menu choices. I cringe to write a review based on a limited tasting, but here I could do some real damage to the menu - as you can see I did from the picture up top (note: there were only 2 of us plowing through that Pick of the Chick order). And I could see the team's focus: they were here to do fried chicken and pie, and to do them right.

With a full sample of the Hill Country Classic and Mama El's chicken styles, biscuits, some Boylan soda (from the fountain!), and a 3" cherry pie we settled in to feast. I would not be true to my Texas roots if I said this was the best fried chicken I have ever had. True enough, in my opinion Babe's in Roanoke, TX (ie the middle of nowhere) is as good as it gets.  But Elizabeth Karmel, the chef of Hill Country, has done her research and puts up a damn good fight. Let's just say I'll be back for seconds.

While the chicken was delicious, the real gems in my book where the items not yet part of a NYC food craze like fried chicken: biscuits and pie. Here Hill Country Chicken blew me out of the water. The biscuits, which I'll admit I toss to the side at most restaurants as empty calories and stomach filler, were the perfect balance of buttery, sweet, and fluffy. Quite the accomplishment and not to be missed.

Oh and then there was the pies! Hill Country Chicken is not throwing in dessert as an after thought. In fact, I expect I may end up returning for the pie and grabbing some fried chicken just because I'm there more often then not. The selection is vast, from Whiskey Buttermilk to Margarita to all the fruit classics. I settled for a cherry pie, which the chef described as a perfect balance of sweet and tart cherries. I couldn't agree more, and the 3" size made it perfect for an individual sweet snack.