In the Beginning...

My mother tells a story of me at age 3 or 4, coming up to her cooking and taking a bite out of a whole raw onion, like an apple. I seemed to enjoy it.

I recall making fried eggs a lot as a kid. I especially remember saving the oil in the pan by putting it back in the bottle. I shiver at how rancid the oil must have been. 

I remember telling my parents I wanted to be a chef, and them telling me no I don't, I just want to eat all the time. Thanks. 

High school and early years of college I'd clip the recipes posted in the local newspaper. I honestly don't recall cooking anything, but I only recently went through the binder with all these clippings and finally started purging. 

Senior year of college, I lived with a vegetarian, who had a vegan girlfriend. We'd take turns cooking (and it was mostly pasta), but that's when I dropped meat from my diet, not because they converted me but because it was just easier to cook without meat (and I never really learned to properly cook meat to begin with). 

Finally, back in 2005-6, I attended a few in-house cooking classes by a wellness coach (the person cooking was my friend's girlfriend's roommate. I never got into the wellness aspect of it). I learned a bit about actual healthy eating, and from there I think I actually started looking at proper techniques, actual recipes instead of winging everything, and replacing fats in food with spices or other flavorful offerings. 

I lived with friends/housemates until 2011, and we'd often do communal cooking, so that helped as well. 

There was no real food story in my family either -- my parents were both raised in the midcentury Midwest, the cradle of salads that include jello and frozen mayonnaise.  Boomer bore the brunt of the cooking responsibility, as she was an old-school stay-at-home mom, but she hated, hated, hated to cook.  She fed us well, but never anything fancy or in any kind of culturally traditional or authentic manner, and certainly never with any sense of using non-processed ingredients.  Dad liked to cook, but did so rarely, and while he was better at it than Boomer, he also had little knowledge beyond my household's holy bible of cooking, The Betty Crocker Cookbook, 1972 edition:



Fortunately, what my parents lacked in skill (or, in Boomer's case, interest) they made up for in enthusiasm for letting their kids get involved in the kitchen.  Many of my earliest memories are of Boomer making double-batches of pie crust (pie was the only foodstuff she was genuinely really good at) so that we could have our own pieces of it to roll out and shape and play with.  I remember pulling a chair from the kitchen table up to the edge of the stove on Saturday nights when Dad was making spaghetti sauce (again, nothing authentic or anything) and getting to dump all the dried spices in.  Despite the fact that we almost never had fresh vegetables with dinner (always Stouffers frozen), we always had made-from-scratch cakes from the Betty Crocker book.  And as soon as we were old enough to follow a recipe, the job of baking birthday or special-event cakes would fall to one of us kids.  And I was the one who most enjoyed doing it.

So, while I wasn't exactly up to my elbows in, like, cuisine, I was at least really comfortable growing up in the kitchen and following recipes.  One fateful day when I was about 13, Boomer made sloppy joes for dinner.  Somehow a longer hair (probably one of mine, actually) had ended up in the frying pan with the ground beef, some of the beef ended up cooking onto the hair, and that hair ended up in my sloppy joe.  My stomach curdled.  And for some reason I decided to blame the beef, and decided I wasn't going to eat red meat anymore.  No one else in the family was on board with that, though, and it seemed patently unfair to ask Boomer to make me a second dinner every night that she was cooking with beef.  So that was when I started getting into more everyday cooking.  By the time I graduated high school I had become my family's primary cook.  I hewed close to the style of cooking we were all used to, but I realized as I read more and more recipes and delved into more (but still basic) cookbooks that my parents had both always been pretty terrible at this.

After my dad died I lived at home during college, and Boomer happily ceded the kitchen entirely to me.  I watched tons of Food Network (back when it still had instructional shows), subscribed to Gourmet, bought cookbooks at every opportunity, and basically decided that as long as someone gave me good instructions, I felt confident I could cook anything.  I was never a kitchen swashbuckler, but I didn't shy away from ambitious projects.  And the more ambitious projects I did, the more I felt like I needed to keep ratcheting up the stakes, and the more I felt like I had to fashion myself after the "boys with their toys" sort of rock-star chef thing that comes up in more "masculine" circles of the culinary arts (especially in the late '90s/early '00s); it seemed to me that the true measure of genuine cooking skill was found in that sort of bro-heavy world.

And then!  Lo!  I moved around the country a bit, then settled back here in central NJ, right next door to one of the oldest and largest CSAs in the country.  And on a whim, I signed up.  That changed everything.  I stopped trying to chase all the latest big-swinging-dick trends and instead just got into the big-swinging-dick trend of "sourcing".  That led to canning and preserving, cooking seasonally, trying to get comfortable just puttering in the kitchen with the things you have on hand, trying (and often failing) to just keep up a decent day-in-day-out, year-round pace of being reasonably well-fed.  Making friends online was also huge, in that I gained perspective on what other people do for everyday cooking, found regular inspiration and ideas, and generally steadied my own sense of contentment with where I am as a cook.

And that's where I'm at now, getting closer to the age Boomer was when she handed her everyday cooking over to me.  Perhaps I need to think about teaching one of my cats to cook?

My mother got married young - maybe 18 or 19? And her mom's not what you'd call the teaching sort. So when mom moved out and got married, she knew veeeeery little about household stuff like cooking. My sister and I were her attempt to make sure this didn't happen again. We learned to do all kinds of basic things starting very early - make pasta and rice, do baking things, and so on. When I was about 7 I had made cookies and was very happily taking them out of the oven when I rested the whole sheet squarely on the inside of my forearm, leaving a burn about 8 inches long. Ow. I also remember that my big showstopper at that point was something more or less of my own invention called Wiener Pasta Pot, which was as its name indicates noodles, tomato sauce, and sliced up wieners. We lived like kings! Hell ass kings! Later on I got into breadmaking, and there was a phase where I made an ill-advised deal to make the family's bread three times a week in exchange for not enough money, when I was maybe 11. Now I know *much* more about cooking than my mom, and am much more comfortable improvising within a recipe than she is (she once said she couldn't make a recipe because she could only find dijon mustard, not the spicy brown mustard the recipe specified). I also got to introduce her to spatchcocking last Christmas.

You never made food before 2005?  Like not even toast?

When we were kids my brother famously invented the "el Hot-o", which was a tortilla smeared with taco sauce, sprinkled with cheese (optional), and microwaved.  For all that I snickered at him, I certainly never invented any recipes!

You all grew up with Betty Crocker, but I grew up with this:




Illustrations by one Andrew Warhol.

Mm, mm, mm, it's nice hear that Canadian usage of "barbeque" again. I missed that.

I was always in the kitchen from as early as I can remember, prepping and otherwise helping out. I remember being very young and helping my mother make haggis which she'd decided to try for god know's what reason. I remember cutting and grinding the meat with one of those heavy cast metal grinders clamped to the kitchen table, and how weirdly the meat in the hopper pulsated when you cranked the handle. When I was old enough (10 or so) I had to make dinner once a week - it was almost always pork chops and mashed potatoes with frozen peas or the infamous "hamburger slop", though some times I was allowed to make fish sticks and oven fries. I had a few fancier recipes that I would sometimes make - I'd made a sweet and sour pork that turned out well, I'd make that when I was feeling adventurous. And grilled lamb chops with bottled mint sauce was a favourite of mine, but lamb was so expensive.

Just remembered - when I was 16 I think, maybe 15, I ended up at a house party on thanksgiving weekend. It turned out that there were only a few people there - just me, a friend of mine, and a few girls we didn't really know. But come Sunday, I decided that we had to do the whole turkey dinner - we somehow tracked down a turkey and I roasted it and did all the sides. I don't know what possessed me to attempt to cook a full turkey dinner - drugs maybe, or just the presence of girls - but I was confident that I could do the whole shebang; stuffing, gravy, veg, cranberry sauce.

Must have been the drugs.

Helped in the kitchen since I was 4 or 5, because I like food. Pulling butter mints at age 11 or 12 remains a peak memory of cooking with my maternal grandmother, mom, and brother. Unassisted grilling at 14. First turkey breast smoked that year as well. Scouting underpinned my self-starting food preparation, also. A significant leap forward came with having time in the 90s to watch the Great Chefs series on PBS or basic cable syndication. I also enjoyed Justin Wilson's patter and cooking on PBS. Overall, however, the Great Chefs series, be it New Orleans, the Caribbean, the South, Hawaii, wherever it broadcast was essential to enhancing food preparation and adding spices I hadn't yet thought of to dishes. Staying on the subject of PBS and hours wasted in front of the tube, Yan Can Cook method of garlic, or ginger, destruction and mincing remains in my toolkit of prep. 

Great Chefs was a between-class staple for my roommate and I in college. Ah the days before Food TV.