The idea in of itself is fairly simple; I just need to show someone how to combine ingredients with heat to produce something edible and tasty. However, in preparation for this I began thinking about how I first learned to cook. After a bit of reflection I realized that there was really no way I could just teach someone to cook in one night, especially since I don't want to use any recipes.
What I think will help is just writing out a brief history of me in the kitchen. At the very least it'll allow me to sort of peer behind and look at how I've gotten to where I am right now
I started cooking when I was really young. I'm sure my parents might be able to give me a decent age range, but I have no clue how old I was when I started helping out in the kitchen. My oldest (I think, it's certainly the most vivid) memory of cooking is of a time when I was making cookies with my mom and I touched the pan they were on right after she got it out of the oven. It hurt like hell and my mom taught me how to deal with burns by running room temperature water over it and then treating it with some cream. Clearly this is not getting off to a running start, but at least it taught me some respect for my tools.
My next memories, which I know for a fact are from elementary school, are me running "experiments" on food. Generally, these would just be me playing with food coloring on/in whatever my mom had made for dinner. A lot of times I would also do this to her food for lunch the next day. I distinctly remember my mom bringing orange colored chicken, blue mashed potatoes and something that was probably green to school for lunch. I doubt I was doing any actual cooking at this point, but I am positive that they were fun at the time.
I soon entered the actual realm of food preparation. I began cooking stir-fry for the family dinners, something very simple and super fun to make. Since I had no idea what I was doing, I just began experimenting with whatever spices my mom had around. Sometimes this would turn out pretty well I'm sure, but this wasn't always the case. Once the vegetables were so heavily spiced that no one could eat it. I clearly remember trying to keep going with it, but, it was just too much spice for one little kid to handle.
It would be about this time that we started cooking fish for almost every Sunday dinner. I'm not really clear why we did it, but it quickly became the "thing" we did for that dinner. In fact, my mom and I even had a little joke whenever we were cooking halibut which was "Let's do it just for the halibut!" Say it out loud a couple times and if you still don't get it, just ask me. Another favorite fish to make (still is to this day!) for us was salmon. In fact, I even made up my own recipe for a sort of honey bbq salmon! I developed the sauce I use by literally just chucking sauces from the fridge into a bowl and then mixing and tasting until I found a taste I like. Smear this on top of salmon fillets, top with drizzles of honey and onion flakes and you are set! I can still make it exactly as I used to, but don't always have all the ingredients and thus must improvise. I'm sure someday I'll so a write-up on here, but that's certainly for another time!
At about this point in my life I was about to or had entered high school. This is a period of my life most noticeable for intense apathy and a sudden love of those $0.16 packages of Top Ramen noodles. I originally would just make it as it was on the package, but one day my friend Leif clued me in to a little secret of success in the instant noodle soup world. Soy sauce! Once I tried making ramen with soy sauce in it there was no turning back. Unfortunately, even though this sort-of-epiphany came relatively early in the game, it wasn't until a couple of years later that I would start to experiment more with ramen. Eventually hot sauce, black pepper, butter, cheese and sometimes even lunch meats would be tossed into the mixture in an attempt to better the salty death that american instant ramen is. I can't think of them now, but this is in no way a thorough list of what I would try adding to ramen.
Haha, looking back on this last paragraph is really making the pretentious foodie in me cringe at my younger self. However, that's really what I was into during high school so I've gotta put it up here. What I find really interesting about it though, is that even though I was just boiling water and dumping in noodles and flavor packets, I still started to experiment with different flavor and texture combinations. Even with one of the lowest types of food available in a super market, I still tried a ton of stuff in an effort to make whatever I was eating more interesting.
Eventually I went off to college and my first two years there are almost indistinguishable in that pretty much zero cooking (Not really counting ramen and easy mac at this point) happened excepting a tiny bit I did in Musser second semester my sophmore year. I forget exactly what we had, but I know I made soup a few times as well as doing an end of the year meal for us band kids.
My junior year was great however! Reeves, Schaeffer and I moved into an apartment down main st that was in a house that had 4 of our really good friends living in it! Luckily for me, there was a kitchen for every apartment in the house! I started doing "Friday Feasts", originally planned to be once a month but instead turned out to be 2-3 a semester. At the end of fall semester I (with much help from Molly) did an Italian feast consisting of fresh bread, bruschetta (not trad), vegan pasta sauce, 2 types of pasta, chicken siena and a fruity ricotta cheese dip. I have since made that meal twice more (without the ricotta stuff) and it is a huge hit every time! Another recipe I'll have to do a write up here for is the chicken siena, that stuff is banging!
Over the course of this and last school year I've learned a ton about cooking. Some is definitely due to hands on experience making food that looks really good to me. However, a lot of how I cook comes from reading Goons With Spoons, too many blogs, TasteSpotting, FoodGawker, cookbooks and food literature, whether it is about food preparation, history, the industry, a mindset or becoming more conscious of what you eat and where it comes from.
I think what this whole thing really boils down to is this. There is no way I can possibly fit all of this, this love and passion that I have for food, no way I could make her understand what a pot of boiling water for pasta or a crackling pan full of hot oil and vegetables means to me in 90 minutes. How can I explain that the simple act of sitting down and slicing and dicing vegetables is something that I not only look forward to and love doing, but that it almost always calms me down, relieves stress and just generally lifts my spirits. Or how about the many hours I've just spent reading recipes and other people's thoughts on food? This I feel is the integral part of who I am as a cook today, but I don't think just anybody can sit down and read recipes off the internet for 3 hours chunks of time.
Is it possible for me to convey all of this over the course of cooking one fairly simple meal? Despite all of the above, I would argue that yes it is. Granted I will not be able to make her understand just how important it is for me to sit down every now and again and just make food, but I am absolutely positive that she will not only come away from this with a solid foundation for food experimentation, but at a little more respect for what goes onto her plate and into her mouth. I already know that I am going to hype local food to her, and stress the importance of trying to get to know who and where your food comes from. It may be hypocritical now as I do not know any of this, but I feel that if I can stress it to a non-foodie then she may influence a portion of her friends to at least think about seeking out this knowledge the next time they go shopping. Anyways, I've already got a CSA picked out in case I get into grad school, so back of critics!
While I do not know just how much of the love and passion I have for what goes on in the kitchen I'll be able to communicate on Thursday, I'm pretty sure that we'll pull out a banging meal that she won't soon forget. Since I forgot to mention it, we are making the following:
- Roasted Chicken
- Sundried Tomatoes & Fresh Rosemary under the skin
- Stuffing: challah, onion, celery, green pepper, craisins, mushrooms, S&P and sage
- Stir-Fry
- Carrots, onion, garlic, green pepper, snap peas, zucchini, soy sauce
- Rice
1 comment:
Let's also add the part about how when you were 2 you'd give us Tupperware bowls to wear on our heads so we'd be the Tupperware family... Also around that age, you'd pull whatever you could reach out of the pantry and take whatever I'd let you use and pour it into a bowl and try to get us to eat it! No wonder you're so good at cooking, you've been doing it since you were 2!
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