A New Year, another year-long opportunity to make mistakes. Perhaps the thought of making mistakes may hold others back from trying new things, but not me.
Didn’t Sinatra croon something like this:
Mistakes, I’ve made a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
But through it all.
I did it myyy waaaayyy…
That’s my view when it comes to cooking.
My lovely, long-suffering spouse, Lady Pamela, made a shrewd calculation years ago. She decided it was worth it to turn me loose in the kitchen, and run the risk I might serve her food that was under-cooked or over-cooked, or maybe under-seasoned or strangely seasoned, if it saved her from slaving over a hot stove and freed her from dealing with all the grocery-buying and menu-deciding quandaries in exchange for having everything served up to her on a usually tarnished silver platter.
So far, the calculation has worked in her favor. She has received years of mostly nutritious, mostly tasty, mostly palatable meals, and I have not killed her. It was a gamble, but the odds have proven to be in her favor. Lucky her.
That’s not to say there have not been a few mistakes or downright disasters along the way.
I have had no training in the culinary arts and my nanosecond attention span means I cannot sit through YouTube videos on how to cook things, but I can read a recipe.
But even that is limited because there are so many words I do not understand like Demitasse, Blanche, Butterfly, Deglaze, Parboil, Roux, Ricer, Spatchcock, and many others. I usually skip over those words whenever they come up in a recipe. I just take an alternate route to get to a mostly passable finished product.
Then there are all the cooking processes I don’t understand either.
For years, I didn’t believe you could separate the egg whites and the yolks. I thought the recipes were joshing me whenever they told me to ‘separate the egg whites from the yolks’ and do something different with each. I just said to myself, “That must be some other kind of egg. With my eggs, they come together, so they’re going in together.”
It wasn’t until my wife called me out on this, “Why does this look so yolky? Weren’t you supposed to separate the yolks from the whites?” That’s when I got a scolding, I mean, demonstration on how to separate eggs.
Sure, I’ve committed the usual rookie mistakes like confusing Arborio rice with Orzo pasta. (To my defense, they kind of look alike and they both have a long ‘o’ in their names, so you can’t laugh me out of the kitchen for a minor transgression like that.)
Anyway, my cooking has not killed her yet, so I still have one steady customer.
But that’s not to say there haven’t been any close calls.
One time I was absent-mindedly listening to a podcast where someone was talking about using rice wine in a recipe and how it transformed the flavor. I figured I better get me some.
However, I misheard him to say ‘ricin’, pronouncing it as ‘ricine’. When I tried to order a bottle of ricin online, I had great difficulty sourcing any. That’s when I discovered that ricin is a potent poison made from the seeds of the castor bean plant. I hurriedly erased my search history before I started getting calls or visits from Homeland Security.
I’m glad I recognized my error when I did. I would have been even more ticked off if I had gotten ahold of a bottle of ricin, put it in the pantry, and then found out there are no non-criminal recipes I could use it in. That would have been a colossal waste of money.
Like I said, haven’t killed her yet, but I have noticed she put a Seniors-font-size sticker with the number to our local Poison Control Centre on the wall right next to our phone.
The trials, successes, and life lessons of the kitchen. Beautiful!