To my mother's everlasting chagrin, I like to cook. My mother herself loathes cooking. I've never understood why, since I really enjoy it, but then I hate doing laundry and while I wouldn't say that my mother loves it or anything, she doesn't seem to avoid it the way I do. I'll wait until I'm completely out of underwear and have to shimmy into a pair of ratty leopard print bikinis from 7 years ago that I really need to get rid of because every time I look in my drawer and see that one last pair I figure I can put off laundry one more day. I always forget that the leopard panties don't exactly fit (and never actually did) and then I'm stuck doing both the laundry and the Up The Crack Samba at the same time.
Which may explain why I don't like doing laundry.
Actually, if my husband is reading this, he's scratching his head and saying to himself, "But… I do the laundry!" Which is completely true. Dave does the laundry at our house now because he's at home and he gets tired of the pile in our bedroom long before I do. Also, he has a knack for folding T-shirts that I cannot master. No matter how carefully I try, I always wind up with a wadded-up ball of cloth whereas Dave effortlessly folds a T-shirt such that it looks like an American flag presented at a military funeral - a crisp and precise bundle created according to formal tradition.
Laundry may not be my forte but as I say, I do like to cook. I'll try just about any recipe you put in front of me, assuming I have the time to do it and access to the ingredients. There are only a few foods I won't work with, because I don't like them. Why should I go through all the effort to come up with a result that I know I don't want to eat? Licorice flavored anything tops the list - I can't stand the stuff. I don't do much with chocolate because I don't care for it nearly as much as other dessert options. I don't make anything that contains almond because Dave has an aversion to it. This was a huge problem for me to remember when we first started going out because I love almond. I'd order something that included almond paste or marzipan and not even notice it, but when I'd offer a taste of it to him, which he took unwittingly, he'd gag right there at the table. For years when we were dating I just never ordered stuff with almond in it because we like to share our orders at dinner. These days I'll scope out the amaretto cheesecake from a mile away and order it with my appetizer. They're right when they say that marriage changes you.
As far as cooking goes, I've had some real successes, all of which make me very proud. I actually took pictures of my first soufflé; I was absolutely amazed that it rose correctly. When I made duck stock last year and it gelled just perfectly I sang all the way to the store for ice cube trays in which to freeze it. I spent weeks perfecting angel food cake and did a little victory dance when I got it right. For the last two New Year's Eves I've come up with some recipes of my own design, including duck with cherry-Merlot sauce, seared foie gras on gingerbread with sautéed apples and champagne sauce, and a prawn dish based on a meal I had on Maui.
But I've had my fair share of raging failures in the kitchen. Dried out pork chops, undercooked turkey, and nasty tasting sauces just for a start. Dave secured his already considerable place in my heart by not only choking down one of my early failed experiments but then asking for seconds. When we were first dating I tried a recipe for "Alsatian Onion Pie". Given that my ex-boyfriend Cheese Boy had been the type who picked sesame seeds off his hamburger bun because they were too exotic, it was a joy to be with a man who was a self-proclaimed omnivore and thought so many of the recipes I'd been wanting to try sounded delicious. So I bought a boatload of onions and proceeded to slice and then "caramelize" them. Except that I'd never caramelized anything in my life and didn't know what to look for. Thus, when the 7 minutes approximated in the recipe were up, I pulled the onions off the heat, popped them into the piecrust, poured the quiche-like egg mixture over the whole mess and slid it into the oven.
When it came out the pie looked lovely, if a little... white. I let it cool a bit, sliced it up and served it. As Dave munched his first piece, I was finishing something in the kitchen. He was halfway through when I finally sat down to my pie. My first bite told the tale. The onions were crunchy and still rather sharp tasting. I choked down a few more bites as Dave and I discussed caramelization and the folly of being a slave to recipe time approximations. Each bite was worse than the one before. When Dave asked for a second slice, despite our ongoing dissection of everything that was wrong with the pie, I knew I had a real catch. He was either a supportive mate even when I failed or he had no taste buds whatsoever so he'd always be really easy to cook for. However you looked at it, he was clearly quite the keeper.
There is, of course, a distinct difference between someone who can cook and someone who can follow a recipe. Following a recipe has its own difficulties as you can see from the Onion Pie disaster. You're learning the terminology and you need a certain amount of experience to be able to follow recipes with consistent success because a recipe is just a guide. You may want more salt or less basil or whatever, and cooking times vary wildly. You have to know what something looks like when it's done (or what temperature it reaches internally when we're talking about meat) and you just learn that by doing it. Over time, you start figuring out what herbs can be substituted for different results, and which flavors match which other flavors. When you start using those substitutions, messing with the variables, that's when you start to cross the line from recipe-follower into really knowing how to cook.
I've only recently begun crossing that line, though I still follow a recipe just about any time I try to cook a new food. The thing is that it's a lot easier to come up with terrible new foods than it is to create dishes that are marvelous. I'm not about talking terrible food in the sense that it's burned or undercooked or has too much pepper in it or something. I mean food that was just a bad idea to begin with. The proliferation of cookbooks at the local Barnes and Noble might lead you to believe that it must be a snap to create new taste sensations, but you really have to have a feel for it before you can try exotic combinations with success. Even the pros mess it up from time to time. Take, for example, the infamous Bacon Icee fiasco of 1982. The texture was all wrong, little bits of pork fat caught in the spoon straw and kids just didn't go for it at all. A dark day for the Icee polar bear, all in all.*
There is a vast wasteland of bad food ideas. Some of them made it into actual cookbooks (check out James Lilek's Gallery of Regrettable Food if you don't believe me), others lie dormant in the minds of budding chefs everywhere. Some new flavors sounded like a good idea at the time (Crystal Pepsi, for an example) but when sprung on an unexpecting public they fall by the wayside.
It can be pretty fun to come up with horrific sounding food, just as an exercise in creativity. It's even more fun to try to convince a kid that any of the following is what you're going to make for dinner:
These are all clearly not a good idea to pursue. However, there are some combinations that don't sound good right off the bat but if you're adventurous you might discover something marvelous. I attended a cooking class yesterday that featured a recipe for Cold Cucumber-Lavender soup that didn't sound so great on paper but it turned out to be quite good. It takes persistence, tenacity, and a little courage to try new recipes, to forge new ground with flavor and texture combinations. Countless chefs and food scientists dedicate their careers to presenting diners and drinkers with new and exotic flavors to enjoy. The massive popularity of Iron Chef should be enough to convince anyone that there are many many people in this world who will happily put on their adventurer's hat, sally forth to the table and chew, sip and swallow their way through the latest in culinary experimentation.
That still doesn't explain Zima, though.
- KNP June 29, 2003
* - no, there was never a Bacon Icee. We can blame that flavor concept on Dave.
