cooking and better homes and gardens and 30 minutes and simple recipes and tango

Usually it isn't a good idea to write about things that show one's incompetence, but I will do so in this essay. For no good reason that I can think of, I never learned how to cook. I suppose I imbibed the spirit of the 1950s when growing up, that mom would be the one at home all day and be responsible for fixing meals, and then never learned how to cook in my student days or married life. But, to be honest, I have been living alone or with my son for 4 1/2 years now, and I still never had cooked a real meal for myself or us. Oh, I have made spaghetti or hamburgers, and I was good at putting tomatoes on a bed of lettuce, but I really never "multi-tasked" over the stove. Until tonight. There were reasons that led me to do so now, but I won't get into them here. Suffice it to say that the task of making a meal tonight consisted of three things: buying an "easy" cookbook, shopping for the food, and then putting it all together. While the smoke is gradually clearing from my kitchen and living room, I will tell you what I did.

A Cookbook

I knew I was in rather deep trouble when I went to the bookstore and found Cooking for Dummies to be too complex for me. Forget the "Southern style" cookbooks or "Gourmet" books without end or someone's guide to "Country cooking." I just wanted 30 simple recipes which would be tasty and wouldn't kill me or any guest I wanted to feed. Someone recommended Cooking for Two, since I will be doing some of that now, but the list of ingredients on the left hand side of each page scared me. After thumbing through a lot of "30-minute dinner"-types of books, I settled on Better Homes and Gardens 30 Minute Main Dishes. Its subtitle is "Cooking for Today," even though it was published last century. I went for the simplest of all the recipes, which listed only five items on the left, and decided to see if I could make "chicken with honey-cranberry sauce. Each of the recipes is on the left page, with a facing picture of what the creation should look like. This dish had orange slices and broccoli also on the plate, so I decided to imitate that, too. After learning from my secretary that you cooked broccoli in boiling water, I decided I was ready to proceed.

Shopping for Ingredients

I have a spice rack at home, but I haven't touched any of the spices for at least 4 1/2 years. I keep them there, however, to give myself the impression that I have a "normal" kitchen. I don't know why "normalcy" is so important for me in food, since it isn't a very significant category for me in anything else I do. I was delighted that the store had things like ground ginger and honey (I figured they would have butter and chicken breasts), which I found after asking helpful salespeople. I also picked up some pudding for dessert, which my secretary suggested I might want. As I went down the aisles, I clutched the cookbook to my chest like a new convert caresses the Bible. I made sure that I had all the ingredients I needed. I had to buy a pack of four chicken breasts, but I figured I could use them on another occasion.

Well, then it was time to cook. I left the book open, and now I realize why some of my friends have those plastic shields over the pages as they work on recipes. At least now the book opens automatically to the "Chicken with Honey-Cranberry Sauce" recipe, principally because several pages are now stuck together. Well, I put some margarine in the skillet, proceeded to melt it and cook the chicken. There seemed to be a lot of spattering going on, and then I saw that the skillet was starting to get charcoal-colored on the bottom. I made the mistake of using a plastic spatula to move the chicken around in the butter, and I think the spatula either melted or became encrusted with some of the butter and chicken. I didn't have time to think about any of this because all of a sudden the smoke alarm went off. It took me several moments to realize what was happening, and then I ripped off the cover of the thing and took out the battery. It was only then that I thought I might turn on the fan on the stove. The rest of the cooking went flawlessly, except for the fact that I realized that the recipe was for four servings, while I was only going to eat one. Thus, the half can of cranberry sauce was probably too much for one piece of chicken, even though it did make the chicken pretty tasty. But I really felt proud of myself, especially when the chicken was finished grilling and I was doing three things--keeping the chicken warm in the oven, heating the broccoli and mixing the cranberry sauce along with honey and ground ginger. After slicing an orange (which I happened to have in the refrigerator), I put it all on my plate, and even though my creation didn't look exactly like the picture in the book, there was a family resemblance.

Conclusion

The cleanup took a few more minutes than expected, principally because the skillet now had a layer of black on the bottom which resisted most of my efforts to remove. I thought that it probably would give the next chicken breast some "taste," so I wasn't obsessed with making everything clean. But I did have a veritable pile of skillets and other dishes drying under the linen towel on the drainer when I finished my cleanup. Now that I am writing this essay, I think I burned my finger, too, but I will live. I thought that the smoke was lingering in the house a long time, and then I realized that my glasses were pretty "foggy" with grease and dirt, so I cleaned them off, too.

So, I feel strangely empowered tonight. I don't think I will show up at the Benson in Portland tomorrow looking for a job as head chef, but I believe I could probably repeat what I did tonight. Then, when I have done that a few times, maybe I could even branch out to another dish. Along with beginning tango lessons (started two weeks ago), cooking is now coming into my life. Who says that life's best adventures aren't before us?

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