Friday, January 1, 2010

I am not a cook.


I grew up eating very basic food. My mother for the most part made dishes with few ingredients and that she knew from memory. I rarely saw her work from a recipe. The dominate seasonings used were Lawry’s season salt and butter (I know… it’s not really a seasoning. That is the point.). A common meal growing up was consisted of simple (over) steamed broccoli with cheese sauce, main course of very rare pan fried steak with Lawry’s and rice-a-roni mix. I remember eating a lot of frozen dinners and boiled hot dogs. The only lettuce I knew was iceberg. Some of my favorite recipes growing up where spinach dip, green bean casserole and hash brown casserole. When I called home from college to get the recipes, I discovered these recipes all came from the back of packaging of the key ingredients.


Not to say I don’t appreciate the cooking my mom did for me. She worked full time and, as a single mom, understandable did not make fancy cooking a priority. I loved her cooking. It was comfort food. I was a vegetarian during my teen years and my mom mastered tofu lasagna and found “veggie dogs” for me (long before they were popular and readily available at any store). There was definitely love in her cooking.


I was always interested in the idea but not the reality of cooking. In High School during my vegetarian years I bought the Moosewood Cookbook but found the recipes and ingredients too complicated. The only recipe I remember completing was hummus. I looked at the ingredients and the artwork and thought about how nice it would be to make recipes but never, for reasons I am not fully sure of, made them. Well, I know why. Cooking is an investment in time and often money, especially for a single person. It just never beat out other priorities, or the path of least resistance which led past Taco Bell.


In graduate school a group of friends started a montly potluck. This gave me a motivation to cook. I always looked forward to selecting the recipe I would create, purchasing the ingredients, packaging the dish for transport, and then sharing it with friends. I started to develop a few specialties, including my signature black bean lasagna dish, and variations on the hummus recipe from the Moosewood cookbook. I learned to make sushi. I loved the ritual of going to the Japanese market and picking out the ingredients. It was so impressive to guests, which made it even more rewarding. This was 10 or more years ago, when Sushi was considered slightly more special than it is now.


After graduate school I moved to Manhattan. Working full time I had less time to cook. I would wander the aisles of the Green market on Saturdays, wondering what the ingredients could be used to make. Occasionally I would buy something unique with high aspirations to try a new recipe, but such ingredients either rotted in my refrigerator fully intact or, even worse, rotted after I spent considerable time attempting something that just wasn’t that good.


Shortly after moving to New York, I signed up to volunteer at a cooking school where I would help set up for evening and weekend class in exchange for the opportunity to participate in the class for free. I did this several times, including a shop and cook class where the instructor, a Chinese cookbook author, took us on a shopping tour of China town and then we prepared a meal using the ingredients we purchased. These courses gave me overviews of various cuisines and ingredients and many cooking basics. I learned more by helping set up for the class because I had individual time with the instructor and help pull the ingredients together.


I cancelled the last cooking class I was scheduled to volunteer for due to nausea when I was pregnant with my now-2-and-a-half-year-old daughter. I haven’t done much cooking since. A few notable recipes stand out over the last three years including a delicious chicken enchilada casserole, Greek stuffed chicken breasts, sesame seed encrusted tuna steaks, magnolia bakery cupcakes and a few perfect roasted and carved chickens. I have also master the fried egg due to my daughter’s preference for “egg toast” for breakfast which I am pretty sure she thinks is one word. Oh, and several types of pancakes from scratch.


I am not a cook by any measure. To this day I pull out Mark Bittman’s cookbook when I need to boil an egg. But, cooking is something I have always wanted to learn to do. This is my chance.


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