I Am What I Am…A Full on Kitchen Retard

This post could have an alternate title: “How to Starve a Guy in Six Weeks”

I have become a bit of a …let’s say “project”…for my mother and grandmother. It started on a Tuesday…

This is a flashback, please picture Wayne and Garth saying “do do do” and making flash back hands.

When I got married ten years ago, in 1999, I was 20. I was barely out of mother’s nest, I was in college, and I was proud to say I had, for my whole life, never dwelt in the kitchen for a longer stretch of time than it takes to nuke a bowl of soup or a TV dinner. I am not sure how it came up, but I mentioned to my grandmother (my father’s mother) at the wedding that I could not cook—at all. The wedding day advice she gave me was “Honey, you keep it that way!” And when the guests kissed me, and said their good-byes before I slipped into the getaway car, she whispered in to my ear, “Remember, don’t let ‘em make you cook.”

It was advice I lived by. We (Paul and I) got a lot of advice that day, a lot of good advice, most of which we didn’t follow so well; perhaps things would have turned out differently. I find the best advice really is the advice you actually WANT to live by anyway, so the not cooking thing I DID live by. Which was fine, and it was easy, since Paul actually likes cooking. He cultivated and grew his skill, cooking became an art form to him, he acquired books about the philosophy of cooking, and repeatedly experimented with sauces and creams until he had them perfected. I am excellent at washing dishes, or at least at knowing when to call it, admit a dish is too dirty to waste soap and time on, and throw it away---but ah, now that is another topic for another post.
Now that we are divorced, Paul feels he should not have to do all my cooking anymore. What I miss most is the hollandaise sauce...or maybe the manicotti.

(Moment of silence)

But I am moving on.

Ok the flashback part is over. Now I am just giving you some facts you need to understand how sad and pathetic I am behind and apron.

Delicious sauces and creams aside, I am undeniably, twitterpatedly, stupidly, tripping over bumps on cloud nine and landing happily face first in love with Ryan, so I have no complaints. But, the boy had a mother who had a brood, and could put things in a pot, stir it, and out came food. He has sisters who grew up, and can put things in pans, bake them in the oven, and out comes, what I hear, are the most fantastic homemade Oreo delights. And don’t get me started and his former wife, but I will just say the woman could do things with chicken that…that… I don’t even own the utensils for doing. And she made crème puffs—she made them—you know those things behind the glass in little bakeries?

If it were not for Carl (of Jr’s) and Ronald (of the McDonald clan), and a few of their associates, Ryan, Elsa, and I may have starved. Well those two might have, I can live for years on Lean Cuisine and oranges—but I would have missed them both terribly.

So here we are, going on average American family status—we have 1.5 children, and a dog. My mother adamantly assures me that at my age (thirty-thanks you very much), it is customary for a woman, if she has multiple spawn to feed , to learn to work that hot thing in the kitchen under the microwave. My grandmother’s aspirations for me (this would be my mother’s mother now) are a little more modest. She would just like me to learn to use the microwave with fewer explosions.

As I said, at the beginning of this long rant, I am a project, and it started on a Tuesday.
I was at home. Ryan was at work, Elsa was at school, and I was blissfully unaware I was on the cusp of change. My mother called and told me to go to the kitchen. I quickly identified the room of the apartment to which she was referring and took my next instruction, which was to relay to her the contents of my pantry and refrigerator. She had been visiting me just shortly before this, so there were actually some contents in the pantry and refrigerator. I knew the names of many of them. Some I had to just provide descriptions of.

Step by step (literally, step by step, step #1 being “find a baking pan—those would be those long metal things with sides…No, not that, that’s the kitchen sink, try looking in your bottom cupboard. Emma Lee, I know you can do this..text me a picture…yes good, that is a baking pan.”) And the following steps being something like “get your _____ from the fridge”, “turn the nob on your oven till it’s on these numbers…the pointy end of the nob is on the numbers…it’s probably the middle nob…no the wires on the stove top should not be turning red, put that nob back how you found it and don’t touch the stove for a while…” At the end of this though, which I believe was hours later, I had prepared, to Ryan’s disbelief, a pan of dinner…like the kind a grown up makes!

If my life were a movie or sitcom, the following few weeks would have been a musical montage, complete with short clips of the following:

Since this incident, my mother has walked me through several dishes by cell phone, my grandmother has given me a stern lecture on pie crust, I have purchase a crock pot, some pie pans, flour, sugar, and vanilla and I have been given some glass casserole dishes, and an egg beater (which, as it turns out, is totally different than a blender. Who knew?) I have made a cheese cake, a lemon meringue pie, pulled pork, and a roast.

The montage could end with me calling my mom to ask if pot holders could just be run through the washer and drier. Her response was, and this is an actual direct quote, “In ten years you have finally gotten your pot holders dirty enough to need wash them?”

My mom has started calling me Martha Stewart. We have not had fast food for dinner for like three weeks. We eat leftovers. And the thing is, I want to take good care of Ry and my kids, and I would like to grow old with him, and I don’t know if old age is conducive to living on hamburgers, fries, burritos and not to mention all the sodium and preservatives that’s in that stuff. And I want home to feel like…homey? I mean, I don’t know why, but there is something that makes you secure in this world if you know your mother can put things in a pot or an oven and make it edible, right? So, I have posted more than once, about my shabby attempts to bake this or that, and it’s funny cause I am a baking loser, but …eh, I am not serious about my attempts anyway, so it’s cool right?

So, after telling you all this, here is the problem. I am trying REALLY REALLY REALLY hard to master the fine art of mediocre cooking, and yet, my exploits in the kitchen are still…at best…funny.

First of all, I was carefully following a crock pot recipe for some meat concoction that sounded so good, and I bet it is if, like the recipe says, you put the red wine sauce and broth into the crock pot BEFORE you cook it for 6 hours.

Or, if you know that a “clove of garlic” is about the size of big fat almond, because what I put in my soup the other day was not a “clove” like the recipe suggested, but it was actually two full heads of garlic (or whatever you call the whole thing) which was about…15 times the amount of garlic the recipe called for. What did I learn from that? Garlic is NOT an ingredient you can over-do and get away with.

Then there were the cookies I baked last night. I brought one to Paul at work today for analysis. His suggestion was that I pretend I was trying to make brownies…he said they still would not be right, but it would make more sense to people why they were…well…like they were. A mob actually gathered in my office to mock my “cookies.” Another lesson I learned today was that if you put a cookie ball into the oven and it remains a ball as it bakes…”you did it wrong.” I was informed that I am not yet skilled enough to bake with brown sugar and that I should stick to white, because it’s less “complicated.” I’m 30 and not yet ready for the trappings of working with brown sugar? Crap.

The sad thing is, it’s true. I had to ask a lady in the store what “unsweetened cocoa powder” was and where to get it, and I have a tray of completely black lumps still sitting on my stove top…some may still have smoke coming off them.

It’s cooking! How can it be this hard? I mean, what else in your life comes with instructions that include the exact stuff you need, exactly what to do, and how long to do it? There may even be pictures? My job does not come with perfectly written instructions for doing it, friendship does not come with that, marriage does not come with that, there is no set recipe for raising children that includes variations for any altitude! And yet, I muddle through those things ok for the most part.

Yet with a piece of paper that says EXACTLY what to do, I can’t make a frizzeekin’ cookie.

*sigh*

I follow this blog and I idolize this girl (who I don’t know at all, and have never met, or spoken to. I stumbled on it by accident):

http://howtoeatacupcake.net/

I idolize her the way little girls idolize princess fairies on the movies, or maybe the way a first year ballet student admires a prima ballerina in a professional company.

I will be starting my own cooking blog though. More of an anti-cooking blog—a cautionary site on how NOT to do things, where I will chronicle this transformation I am not yet giving up on undergoing. I will post a link when I get it up, and I am open to advice ( I got some advice today…don’t bake cookies anymore..but Paul actually gave me a very constructive explanation of my problem with these cookies and he outlines my “Three big errors” and I hope my first new blog post will be a triumphant story of how I rectified last night’s mistakes and made glorious cookies.

If I don't set anything on fire...we'll call it good.