I’ve started cooking a lot more, and I realized just now that I’m starting to measure my weekends by whether I cooked something successful or not.

This is interesting to me, because for those of you who’ve known me for a little while, you know that generally speaking I’ve abhorred the thought of having to cook for a very long time. This originates from my childhood, as I always swatted out of the kitchen or yelled at for being in the way.

My mother cooked, and she cooked fairly well. I remember that she had tons of recipe books and even kept hand-written notebooks of recipes and modifications (I have some of these which I had started transcribing to my computer).

But my mother was also a control freak (ring any bells?) and so teaching us was the last thing on her mind. Most of the time she booted us out of the kitchen, because even if we moved a knife from its normal place, the whole process would be ruined. So I watched her make things from a distance and tasted the recipe’s outcome, but never learned anything actually useful for cooking. Except to stay out of the way.

I didn’t starve, even when my mother went AWOL and my father broke down.  Dad would make these large vats of chicken…whatever, on most Sundays, which we would then feed ourselves from through the following weekend until he made another vat.  This single-handedly explains my disdain for chicken as well as my love for cereal or Ramen as a well-balanced meal.  And since I was then off to college,  where meals were provided or filched, I didn’t care that my cooking skills were limited to hard noodles softened with boiling water and oatmeal.

I ran into some friction when I moved down here, since the person I was living with seemed to expect that I cook more often for him and cook a variety of things too. My cooking skills then were limited to: salmon, ground beef, pasta, and various frozen foods with explicit instructions. In fact, I had never had to cook ground beef for myself until moving in with this person.

You can imagine how motivated I was to learn to cook when one of the things we began to fight about was my lack of cooking skill. In truth? I was completely unmotivated to learn. In fact, I went the other way. Why should I be the one cooking everything? When I was happy eating simple things or pasta every night, why wouldn’t you be? Naturally this attitude got us no where, and I ended up moving out anyway. For the next two years I fed myself simple foods (or would regularly forgo food), and was happy.

Then for whatever reason this past year I’ve been motivated to learn more. I think it’s because I started a job where everybody cooks or bakes, and so suddenly my interest was piqued. I didn’t want to be known as the person who can only cook boxed foods (and sometimes not even then), or who can only eat out.

And I have to credit Danielle for being influential in helping me develop my cooking skill. I felt comfortable cooking for her because she a) wasn’t family that would ridicule me for doing something “wrong” or less efficiently than it “should” be done, and b) is nice enough to tell me the truth without hurting my feelings or vomiting up the food I just gave her. So it is good practice for me to make different things once in a while, and a good way to build up a little confidence.

The arrival of someone else into my life has also spurred me into thinking more about food and how to prepare it. The differences in our cooking styles has also led to some interesting results and discussions. And so that is why I have started to enjoy my weekends more; there’s time to cook, time to experiment. There are people who encourage me instead of ridiculing or overly criticizing what I’m doing (like some family members do), and I am starting to genuinely enjoy the process from start to finish.

With that said, here is what I made lately that have been hits with various people:

• Bacon and egg on an English muffin – okay, this one is simple, but still tasty, and requires assembly (shut up).
• Peanut butter-filled chocolate cookies – I’ve made these before. They’re extremely rich and I can only eat a few of them before quitting. But they’re good. I made a little mistake this weekend on the recipe (added sugar prematurely), but they turned out fairly well, I think. A little more gooey and unmanageable than last time, and I’m not sure why that is. But we managed to make all of them anyway.
• Three-bean chili – This was originally supposed to be vegetarian chili (recipe from the January 2010 issue of Cooking Light magazine), but I decided I didn’t feel like having something vegetarian and I really wanted to make the beef that’s been taking up space in my freezer. So I left out the butternut squash and added about a pound of ground beef. Also added was jalapeno peppers, chives for the meat, and some fresh tomato as well as the diced tomato. And the three beans that were in there included cannellini, kidney, and pinto beans.
• Butterbeer – Alocholic this time. I’ve decided the recipe is much better with club soda versus cream soda. The cream soda is just too sweet. I couldn’t (yet again) even finish half of a glass of the stuff with cream soda. But I did purchase butterscotch schnapps and will probably be making this again (once I get some more butterscotch).
• Thai tea – Also alcoholic. I’d gotten the idea after having real Thai tea at a restaurant the boy and I have begun to like (called Mint, a Thai/fusion restaurant). Then I had a dream that I was drinking alcoholic Thai tea and had a craving for it the next morning when I woke up. And why shouldn’t I be able to make something similar? So my solution was to buy a few small sampler bottles of sweet tea vodka, add some cream (which is what the restaurant said they put in their Thai tea), and see if it tasted the same. It pretty much did. So now I have an interesting new drink to give to people when they come over. Hurray!
• Corn and crab fritters – I always make fun of crabcake-like recipes that aren’t straight up crab, but this one was actually pretty good. Just very hearty and tasty. It was the cornmeal, I think. And I modified the recipe from using large chunks of crab claw meat to finely shredded meat, and I think that made all the difference.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling. I’ve just come a long way from only being able to make cereal, and I’m proud of it. I can take raw ingredients and make actual food out of them. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m growing up (some).

Categories : adventures, food