In the Kitchen

If I had the time, money, and at least one other mouth to feed, I would learn to cook.

I’m actually a pretty decent chef as it is. Back when my younger brothers were involved in youth soccer and basketball and baseball my mom would frequently put me in charge of dinner so that she and my dad could cover practices and games. I would turn on MacGyver or Quantum Leap to keep me company in the kitchen and carefully follow whichever recipe my mom had left out on the counter, whether it be tuna casserole or cowboy delight, or occasionally the dreaded creamed tuna on toast. I’d whip up a batch of biscuits or cornbread, throw some veggies in the microwave, and have the table set by the time everyone walked in the door. (I had more fun than I care to admit with the cornbread. The dry ingredients became a miniature landscape in my bowl, which I would then flood with the wet ingredients. Desert valleys became mountain-rimmed lakes, which I then churned into quicksand with my spoon. With no one else around, I could let my imagination run wild.)

Once I got to college and moved out of the dorms and into an apartment I collected recipes for family favorites from my mother and tried them out on my roommates when it was my turn to cook for Sunday dinner. In the last couple years various sets of roommates have experimented with weekday dinner rotations and this has given me the liberty to try out all sorts of new recipes. And they have usually turned out. My roommates were usually impressed with whatever I managed to pull together, despite a few noteworthy failures, like the time I decided one tablespoon of jalapenos couldn’t possibly be enough and tripled the amount that I added to my pumpkin soup. My roommates were very nice about that one, but there were a lot of watery eyes and no second servings that night.

But the point is that a few failures and dozens of successes has convinced me that I’m not a bad cook. And I know I’m a good baker. I am an expert cookie baker, and my mother has put me in charge of the yearly Christmas dinner rolls after I proved myself several years back. But I still feel like I want to learn to really cook. As it is I tend to experiment with recipes that don’t look much different from anything I’ve done before. I shy away from any recipe that requires me to touch meat with my bare hands, twist or roll or braid bread dough, cut vegetables into shapes with French names, monitor the temperature, or stir continuously for more than about two minutes. I can handle Betty Crocker, but not The Joy of Cooking. And so I’m willing to experiment, but only to a certain degree. If I’m only cooking for myself I want whatever I make to be edible enough to get me through the rest of the week without resorting again to grilled sandwiches, and if I’m cooking for company I want my company to rave about whatever I cook up for them. That doesn’t give me a lot of room for error.

But I think that I would really like cooking if I had the means and motivation, and someday I hope to take a cooking class of some sort, or at least begin choosing progressively more difficult and involved recipes and teach myself. I don’t know when this will happen. It seems that it might require an income, which I won’t have for another three and a half years at least. And if I get married (which would give me the additional mouth to feed) it’s got to happen before the kids come along because I don’t know how well they’ll put up with their mom’s experimentation. When my siblings and I were little we really, really liked tuna casserole and cowboy delight and it was slightly upsetting when something new and different was served.

Meanwhile, I’m still having fun with fairly easy, but always new, recipes. In fact, last night I had a wonderful culinary success when I managed to create a meal without a recipe for the first time ever. Inspired by a soup my visiting teaching companion served me a few weeks ago, I cooked some chicken, threw it into chicken broth with black beans and white beans and corn and green chiles and Cajun seasoning, and it tasted delicious until I added tomatoes. Then it just tasted like canned tomatoes so I panicked and dumped in a whole packet of taco seasoning and what resulted was a sort of super easy chicken taco soup that didn’t taste half bad topped with cheese and crumbled tortilla chips. I don’t think I’ll be writing the recipe down and submitting it to the Pillsbury Bake-off, but at least I have a meal for the rest of the week. That’s enough for now.