Wednesday, November 18, 2009

To Misquote Nixon, "I Am Not A Cook!"

I've always figured that I would be a good cook. I mean, when I lived at home, I always loved it when I was allowed to just "get my own dinner" and make whatever I wanted. I always did fine, and I never went hungry. Until recently, however, I wasn't aware that I wasn't really cooking. I was opening cans or pre-prepared meals and heating them. I really don't have any skills in the kitchen.

Don't get me wrong, I can follow a recipe perfectly fine. If I am given a good recipe, I can keep from messing it up. What I lack is the intuition to just mix something up without a recipe (also the intuition to know when I need to do things the recipe forgot to include).

Also, I have a hard time cooking meat. I like to blame it on colorblindness since I really can't for the life of me tell whether the meat is still pink or not, but I'm sure I could work around that if I tried.

I can't keep eating ramen and fast food forever though, and I can't make Elston always do the cooking, so I need to get some practice. For this reason, I am using my next paycheck to buy The Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition so I can practice cooking from recipes that have been tried and tested for 75 years.

I found this book in Borders on a special display a few weeks ago and I've been fantasizing about it since. I don't know why I want it so bad. I think I like the fact that it basically looks like a dictionary. There is nothing fancy about the book; it is just recipes. No flashy descriptions of why I'll love the recipes, no fancy photos to entice me, just recipes. No cutesy font or Food Networky cover, just plain old recipes. I'm excited.

6 adoring responses:

Kwo Ling said...

I don't follow directions well. I just mix stuff together based on the pictures. To each their own.

Megs said...

I love cookbooks with pictures. Otherwise, I don't know if it looks good enough for me to want to make it. And it's taken me 5 years, but now I'm getting to the point where I can make recipes up and they usually taste good. That day will come for you, boy. It will.

Beth said...

Joel and Megs aren't experts when it comes to the meats, either. It must be a Williams thing.
If you're like your mom, you'll totally get into cookbooks. But I always feel like out of the whole book there's only one or two recipes I actually liked. So then I paid $25 for 2 recipes?
The way I go about it is I subscribe to about 5 food blogs and whenever they feature a recipe that appeals to me I read through the post and then go to allrecipes.com or cooks.com and look up the recipe there. I find one that seems the easiest and try it. But even then half the time I don't like the recipe enough to repeat it.
Good luck, though. I've heard the Joy of Cooking is a solid choice.

Meridee said...

Should I add this to your Christmas list? Or can't ya wait that long?

Cambo said...

I already got it. Sorry Mom!

Sean said...

hello!!! i'm trying to learn how to cook too!! weeeeeee!!