Embrace mistakes while you’re cooking
Watch, practice, learn and embrace the flops
Oh, how we’ve fallen. Why, twern’t too long ago that, come supper time, Pa would tote his shootin’ arn out the back forty and fill a couple varmints with enough buckshot to tenderize their eatin’ bits, if you knowwhat I mean.
No?
How’ bout this, then: People used to know how to feed themselves. Presently, not so much.
Sure, we can follow recipes like a chimp and drop F-bombs like Gordon Ramsay, the shouting, often profane TV chef; but when it comes to turning with breezy insouciance the contents of our fridge into something delectable, we seem to have lost our collective woo. Too many of us, raised without proper culinary learnin’, find ourselves all growed up with nary a clue as to howto manage the kitchenly arts.
Let’s see ifwe can at least start to fix that.
Why you need to learn this
Numerous studies have confirmed the correlation between diet and health. People who eat tend to stay alive longer than people who don’t. Just sayin’.
The steps you take
First, forget all your troubles. Second, c’mon. Get happy. Third, remember that cooking, like nearly everything else, is learned behavior. It’s not just following recipes. Imagine your surgeon, scalpel in one hand, copy of “So, This Is The Brain” in the other.
If you haven’t had the good fortune to have learned froma culinary expert— a beloved parent or grandparent, for example, who could cook the pants off the aforementioned Chef Ramsay— don’t take this the wrongway, but, it’s conceivable you simply may not knowwhat you’re doing. And if you don’t knowwhat you’re doing, you shouldn’t expect success, much less perfection.
To become a good or even great cook, then, treat the task like any other subject: Study. Practice. And learn from both your mistakes
and your successes.
My advice is to start with foods you know, like a simple tomato sauce, or French toast, or a vinaigrette. And think about the following, in no particular order:
1. Knowing what something’s supposed to be before you start gives you a fighting chance of reproducing it. Like that simple tomato sauce. Do this: Brown some bulk, hot Italian sausage over mediumhigh heat in a little oil, then add some canned crushed tomatoes and simmer. The spices in the sausage will season the tomatoes and the result will both look and taste like what you’d call spaghetti sauce.
2. Look for ratios. For example, long grain and parboiled rice are 2 parts liquid to 1 part rice. And a lovely sauce to decorate said rice can be obtained with a ratio of 8 parts liquid (like flavorful chicken broth) to 1 part roux. (Roux itself is a ratio: equal weights of fat and flour cooked together).
Or what about when you want a nice, fresh salad, but that grotty bottled dressing serves only to enrage. A basic vinaigrette is a 3-to-1 emulsion of oil to vinegar. Pour it all into a screw-top jar. Add a pinch of salt and shake like Charo’s hips. (That line would have killed in 1974.) Not necessary, but, you can stabilize the emulsion with a little mustard, and complexifize the flavor with a bit of honey or maple syrup, a spill of hot sauce, some fresh herbs, or a little minced garlic or onion.
Here’s one more: Let’s say Mags and crew, fresh fromtheir negative COVID-19 tests, have arrived at your place and, their senses of taste and smell intact, they’re craving French toast. You recall that a couple of eggs whisked with an equalish volume of milk, a splash of vanilla extract and a dusting of cinnamon will produce about half a dozen pieces of French toast. Doing the math in your brainiac head, you scale up that “recipe” with more eggs and an equalmeasure of milk. See? Math is our friend.
3. Salt. Generally, added salt comprises approximately 1% of a recipe’s total weight. Consider this, then: A teaspoon of table salt weighs about 6 grams. That means that a teaspoon of salt will season 600 grams, or about 1.3 pounds, of food, enough for two moderate humans. Note that different types of salt— table, kosher, sea— and even different brands, have different weights per volume. Thus, taste as you go.
4. Herbs and spices, which we’ll conflate into oneword: spices. Typically, spices are used somewhat sparingly. Look through a handful of random recipes and you’ll see lots of half teaspoons. Consider that different containers of the same herbs and spices will have different potencies, and you’ll understand that it’s just this side of random. Again: Taste as you go. You can always add more basil, right?
5. Learn to eyeball: Measure a quarter teaspoon of salt or spice into the palm of your hand to see what it looks like. Add another quarter teaspoon to see a half teaspoon. Add another half teaspoon to see what one teaspoon looks like. Finally, add twomore teaspoons to seewhat a tablespoon looks like. Dig? Eyeballing allows you to cook without wasting precious minutes searching for your consarned measuring spoons.
To conclude: Exercise the same patience in cooking as you would in any other endeavor. Observe your processes and learn, as I said earlier, from both your mistakes and triumphs. Then, shout “hallelujah.”