I rarely get inspired to cook. That’s not really my medium, and when you’ve got a husband who loves it and is a talented and creative cook, the motivation to do your own cooking is rare.

However, I am completely motivated by how-to videos. I used to watch cooking shows on TV and try to write down the recipes, but that never quite worked out (and I’ve never had a DVR, so occasionally I’d record a show but mostly I didn’t). The internet, as usual, has solved this in a wonderful way.

From a link on a blog, I found this gem of a video:

Amar Lahiri makes pulao.

It is delightful, detailed, and most importantly, pausable. This is key.

I thought it seemed easy enough, and I like pulao, so on Monday I went home, got out my ingredients and fired up the video. I only screwed up once, when I hadn’t soaked my rice early enough on and then had to re-head my butter and spice mixture, but it didn’t seem to matter. I also had no milk and substituted watery yogurt, which seemed to make no difference.

Basically, you take a lot of butter, cook up your spices in it, add your rice (pre-washed and pre-soaked), then throw in some nuts and dried fruit (I used figs in place of the golden raisins, since we generally don’t have raisins at home). You let it all soak up the water, then put it in the oven to bake and finish cooking and voila! Rice that smells like Christmas.

And then I discovered the limitations of my little webcam:

Not so great on the close-up focus, and doesn’t make food look tasty. Well, it is, and we have a few more meals worth of pulao left, and next I’m tackling biryani, thanks to the chef on youtube whose videos I posted earlier on.

Yum.