A Manifesto

You may have gotten the impression by now that I really love food. That is correct. Well, I really love good food, and good food comes from only one place: the kitchen. Not the kitchen of Stouffer's, either. My kitchen. But someone has to be in the kitchen to cook the food. So I cook. But if I may be frank with you . . . I don't actually love to cook.

I'm not one of those people who spends hours in the kitchen preparing some elaborate meal because cooking relaxes me. It doesn't relax me. Probably because I do it every single day, three times a day, so it's more like a chore than a hobby. Which means that I'm all about making it easy for myself.

Cooking is easy for me, but you know WHY it's easy? Because I do it so damn much. And this is where I get so irritated with people who get all up on their high horse about how it's so easy to just go into the kitchen and throw things together! Anyone can do it! Even you there, who has never so much as scrambled an egg! YOU CAN COOK! GOGOGOGO!!!

No.

You can cook, sure. You should learn to cook. And you will eventually be able to just go into the kitchen and throw things together that taste the way you want them to, but not until you've been in that kitchen a LOT. To start with, you have to follow recipes so you can learn how to put food together. Reading and following recipes takes time, so it's not going to be easy and quick in the beginning. If you don't have exactly the ingredients called for in the recipe, it takes experience to know what can be substituted or just left out.

Plus, some recipes just plain suck. But you won't know which ones until you either try them or have enough time logged in the kitchen to foresee what combinations of ingredients will be disgusting to you, no matter how carefully the recipe is followed.

I figure it took me about three years of pretty constant cooking before I got really skilled.

I was thinking about this last night as I was making dinner. I started my meal planning with the idea that I would use eggs as my protein. And then I had a single zucchini, some tomatoes, onion, garlic, a few potatoes, a couple of strips of bacon, some fresh oregano and basil . . . these are all things that can be combined into a delicious meal, but to make it without any kind of guide, there were a lot of hard-earned bits of knowledge that came into play.

The order in which to add the ingredients to the pan: bacon first to render its grease, then the onion and garlic to cook in the grease before any liquid was added, then the zucchini to start softening and releasing its water, then the tomatoes to do the same, then the diced potatoes that would cook in the liquid exuded from the previous two ingredients, then the fresh herbs that you really don't want to overcook, then the eggs on top of it all.

How small to cut the bacon and the low temperature it should be cooked at so it renders as much fat as possible.

How small to dice the rest of the ingredients so they cook quickly.

How much water to add so the potatoes cook, but it doesn't get soupy.

How much salt to add, and on and on and on.

Except now I don't really think about these things much, because the practice has made it all automatic. What I think is really a disservice to beginning cooks, however, is pretending that those people can just jump in the kitchen and do this sort of thing without any practice at all. That's untrue, and will result in frustration and probably abandoning cooking altogether. And that would be a shame.

So if you're a novice in the kitchen, just get in there and start cooking. Use recipes, make mistakes, throw things out because they're gross, but just keep on going no matter what. Because that's how the good food gets made. And then, of course, you get to eat that good food, which is the whole point, after all.