Cooking

I have been doing a lot of cooking. I never cooked before we moved back to Silicon Valley. Well, I may have put one or two things in the oven, but usually they came in tin trays—mix stuff myself? are you kidding? My mom never let me near the kitchen (still doesn’t, in her house). I still have to check The Joy Of Cooking every time I want to make a soft-boiled egg. What we did in Los Angeles was get a lot of delivery and go out to eat a lot. Periodically Darin would cook. It was all pretty easy.

Then in June 2003 we moved.

Darin was no longer at home come mealtimes—he was coming in from the office, which around 6pm adds 20 or 30 minutes to when he’s actually home. The kids are at the age where going out is way more hassle than it’s worth. And I can’t get delivery (mostly because no one delivers) or go out to eat all the time, the way we used to. We don’t have the money any more, for one thing. (That’s the funny sort of thing that happens when your mortgage doubles.)

So I’ve been cooking.

I started small, using extremely basic recipes. I’m sure Darin started to be afraid of coming home to yet another meal of baked fish & spaetzle & roasted asparagus, but I knew how to cook those things. I’ve added new things here and there. I’m not by any stretch of the imagination planning on opening my own bistro or anything, but I have gotten high praise indeed for many of my dishes from Darin and my brothers-in-law and our friend Rob, foodies all who seem to enjoy the dinners I put together.

And how did I accomplish this?

If, like me, you find yourself in the position of needing to cook without any damn knowledge or talent whatsoever, here are two recommendations I can make unequivocally: The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook and How To Cook Without A Book.

The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook is currently my workhorse. Good, simple recipes with lots of flavor. Each recipe also gives you the nutritional information per serving—you just have to check out how many servings that recipe is reportedly making. I have made lots of different kinds of recipes from this book, and most of them have gotten high marks from Darin, my toughest critic.

A recent but indispensible addition to our cookbook library is How To Cook Without A Book by Pam Anderson (no, not that one). The book tells you exactly what it means to do: give you a base of simple techniques that you can learn so that you can begin to cook without looking at a cookbook.

Now, this magical “cooking without a cookbook” moment has not happened for me, but I’m doing better. I can think of a few simple things to make without much hassle now. She does rely a little too much on sautéing, which may not be aceptable for you, but it is 1)easy and 2)tasty without being excessively oily. She also has the technique for making a roasted chicken that is amazingly simple and amazingly tasty. (I made it with the lemon-rosemary rub. It rocked.)

In the introduction to her book, Pam Anderson (no, not that one) explains why cooking may have seemed so much easier when we were younger:

The menu was pretty simple back then. Vegetables were cooked one way: seasoned with a chunk of fatback and simmered for hours. Fish and chicken were mostly fried, and cornbread was our baguette. We had one kind of lettuce, two kinds of pasta—macaroni and spaghetti—and lunch meat meant bologna. Mushrooms, spinach, green peas, and black olives came from a can.

…Unlike my mother with her single preparation for green beans, I have many options. Should I snap them as she did, French them, leave them whole, or opt for haricots verts? Should I cook them for hours the way Mom did? Or should I steam, blanch, grill, broil, braise, roast, or even stir-fry them? Should I serve them hot, at room temperature, or even chilled with a dressing? Should I serve them unadorned or infuse them with flavors from the Far East, Far West, or someplace in between?

Well, I can definitely relate to this sort of confusion, even if I can’t relate to diet that includes fatback and cornbread. I grew up on a steady diet of baked chicken breasts (no skin) and corned beef (which I cannot stand). Now that I have this wild array of foods, what am I supposed to do with them? My confidence on that score has risen dramatically over the past year (even though my joy in cleaning up afterwards has not). Having a dinner party for 7 or 8 does not fill me with the same degree of terror that it would have a scant 18 months ago.

There are still lots of areas I need to work on. I tend to let Darin cook the red meat, either on the grill or in the pan, because I’m afraid of cremating it. I must get a meat thermometer, which is my friend! I tend to stick to the same two types of fish, because the kids won’t try anything new: they eat every bite of halibut and salmon that we put in front of them, but they won’t try something else. I would attempt more complex dishes more often, but since the kids won’t try them, I don’t really feel the need to bother. (I made homemade mac and cheese and they wouldn’t touch it.)

But, you know: one thing at a time.

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Darin really enjoys watching cooking shows on Food TV. He learns all sorts of techniques and ideas from those shows (yes, they really are educational). He likes Bobby Flay’s stuff a lot (we call Bobby Flay “the frat boy” because of the way he acts on his show), and he’s quite impressed by dessert chef Jacques Torres (known as “the French frat boy”), although not enough to have actually made anything for me from the one cookbook we have by Torres.

Darin’s favorite Food TV chef—”the best heroin addict chef ever”—is Anthony Bourdain, a real New Yorker type. I am scared of Bourdain, who is tough and wears an earring and travels the world in search of extravagant new tastes and flavors. Darin is intrigued by these unusual spots and meals Bourdain visits; I run screaming from the room in horror.

Bourdain is currently executive chef as Les Halles, a bistro in New York, and he is the author of Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook. Which is, I am surprised to say, my absolutely favoritest cookbook right now. Not that I’m ever going to cook anything from it. Oh no. The text of the cookbook, both the expository and the recipes, is hilarious.

This book aims to be a field manual to strategy and tactics, which means that in the following pages, I will take you by the hand and walk you through the process in much the same way—and in the same caring, sensitive, diplomatic tone—as I would a new recruit in my restaurant kitchen.

Which means that if, from time to time, I refer to you as a “useless screwhead,” I will expect you to understand—and not to take it personally.

Bourdain also did something that none of my other favorite cookbooks with their approachable recipes has done: he has consoled me that I am not, in fact, supposed to have come by an ability to cook naturally.

At Les Halles, and let me repeat here, the best, the most authentic frog pond in the whole damn U.S. of A., almost every single cook in its thirteen-year history has been a rural Mexican with no previous cooking experience. Almost everyone lacks any kind of formal training and entered the business as a dishwasher or night porter. If you think that they spent their childhoods whipping up Mexican regional favorites and developed a natural affinity for food, you are dead wrong, my friend. Ask my saucier to make chicken mole and you’ll get a blank stare and a middle finger. Back in the old country, Mom did that.

Now, of course, they are, pound for pound, some of the best cooks of cuisine bourgeoise in America. I would proudly put them up against any cheese-eating, long-lunch-taking, thirty-two-hour-a-week-working socialist clock-puncher from across the water. Any day. They’d mop the floor with them. This is less a testimonial to my training abilities than it is evidence of the triumph of persistence, hard work, pure hearts, and a sense of humor.

Anyone who says “cooking is in the blood” when talking about professionals is talking out of their ass. Eating well is in the blood. An appreciation of the glories of the table, of good ingredients well prepared, is in the blood. The enjoyment of a long lunch—at table with good friends, tearing into the good stuff made with love and pride—that, arguably is in the blood, or at least in your cultural heritage. But you’ve got that already, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have forked over thirty-five bucks to some publishing conglomerate for this book. Would you?

Well? Would you?

Speak up! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!

The ability to make a good steak frites or sole meunière or cassoulet is a skill that any reasonably coordinated person with a good heart and an average work ethic can accomplish. We will assume, for the purposes of discussion, that you have both.

Granted, the ability to prepare these dishes a hundred times a night, at high speed, in coordination with twenty or so other tasks—while listening to Mexican rap and nursing a savage hangover—is not something everyone should attempt. That requires a special breed. But that’s not what this book is about.

Anyhow, the culinary education of Diane continues apace. I have made quiches and pan sauces, I have made chocolate tarts, I have cooked a beef stroganoff that Darin talks about until this day. I need to rev up on how to cook a roast, because I will be hosting Christmas next year and we need a gigantic piece of meat for the number of people we’re going to be having.

And it does make me feel good to create something from scratch, to make something that’s good for my family. Even if half my family pretty much won’t touch it.