Cooking

I was thinking about cooking on my drive in to work this morning. Perhaps I should submit this as a guest entry over at Christopher’s blog but I think I’ll keep it.

When I was grocery shopping on Saturday I wandered the meat department looking for fast, different dinner ideas that were high protein and low fat and I stumbled across a little section of “dinner ready” meats that included chicken kabobs with peppers and onions, all speared and ready to go, and some cute little lemon-herb pork chops. The chops were boneless and about as big as my fist and looked pretty good. All the fat had been shaved off of them and they had a neat little edge of lemon-pepper.

So I snatched up two kabobs and two chops and felt pretty good about at least two dinners. Throw in a grilled chicken salad and some turkey tacos and I figured we’d do just fine.

And we have. The chops were super and the kabobs decent. Once we had the “how and when do you broil” conversation.

I Am Not a Cook

Cooking for me is a survival skill, not a hobby or a passion. I love watching cooking shows, and sometimes I learn from them, but I have no affinity for kitchen gadgets, nor do I clip and swap recipes on any regular basis or obsess over the spice section at the Farmer’s Market.

I never really learned how to cook or cooked enough to develop any sense of the science of food. I have limited imagination about flavor combinations and am generally incapable of cooking anything without a recipe or instructions. The first time I saw Tanya dump a bunch of random soups into a casserole dish with some chicken and throw it in the oven I almost fainted. How did she know how much soup to put in? How does she know how long to cook the chicken and at what temperature?

Most of what I do know about cooking I learned in a bar. Which means that I’m a fine grill cook and I know how to deep-fry something. I am a stovetop, microwave oven, skillet and saucepan kinda girl. The oven scares me.

And don’t blame my mother for this. I don’t. For the first 18 years of my life that woman put a home-cooked dinner on the table almost every single night and fed three of the pickiest kids and one grown man with a mid-westerner’s limited palate. At the time, I had next to no interest in learning how to cook any of it.

We had meat, potatoes and vegetables. Steak, chicken, pork; baked or mashed; broccoli, carrots, peas, lima beans, corn, green beans and brussle sprouts. And casseroles. These were the things my mother was taught to cook and my father was raised to eat. Many of those meals are requested by me or by one of my sisters on visits home because we love them.

The only ethnic foods we ate were Old El Paso and LaChoy. My mother tried to experiment occasionally. She got recipes from other people and made new and interesting things for the church carry-ins. But I suspect that 9 times out of 10 at least one of us grumbled or complained because there weren’t many new entries that made it into our regular weekly rotation.

The first time I had dinner at the Holland’s and they served Ratatouille I thought I’d landed on another planet.

The first time I heard about Thai food, much less ate any, I was a sophomore in college.

I’ve become a lot more adventurous with my food, even with my vegetables. Well-cooked broccoli tastes really good, even without cheese sauce. And I love zucchini and squash. I still don’t like fish, despite trying a variety of types cooked in a variety of styles and sauces. But I’ve had Ethiopian, Japanese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, and many American regional specialties. Oh, and authentic Mexican and Chinese meals.

And yet, I am not comfortable broiling chicken kabobs. And it’s funny because I cook a lot. I’m almost always in the kitchen whipping up something for dinner. For some reason, the oven is like the most mysterious vessel ever invented. It’s ironic because the stovetop always makes my mother nervous—especially if there’s grease involved.

But it’s also a basic lack of understanding about what goes on with ingredients and cooking. And trying to cook and eat healthy, low-fat meals is made all the more challenging for me because of this. I don’t know how to reduce the fat and calorie content of my favorite meals because I don’t know how to cook most of them in the first place and I don’t know enough or trust my own instincts enough to guess.

My sister Jenny called me “cute” the other day because I was e-mailing around to my family trying to score a recipe for a low-fat, cold veggie pizza that doesn’t taste like ass. I’m cute because Jenny cooks even less and probably worse than I do so it’s funny to her that I’m being all, domestic like. She is the exact same way. Cooking without a net or a recipe is largely unheard of for us.

I think Emily is much braver in the kitchen than we are but she also has unique dietary needs and often makes vegetarian choices that require skills that definitely weren’t to be found in our background.

People who cook impress me. I’m not giving up on the kitchen, just battling along hoping not to set the apartment on fire or serve raw chicken to company. So send me some tasty, low-fat recipes, preferably ones that aren’t too time consuming, and I’ll let you know how I do.