I Don't Know How To Cook

I think you DO know how to cook. Cooking is applying heat to food. Have you burnt bread? Have you eaten crunchy pasta because you already mixed in the cheese sauce so it's too late? That's a good start.

I'm not fibbing or patronizing.

When I left for college I had two cooking skills. I could make hot milk cake, which my boyfriend's mama adored, and (this is my super-power) I never need a timer when I cook pasta. I just know.

YOU, pal, have a superpower too. What is it? Write me or put it in the comments.

So for years I lived off pasta with olive oil and cheese, which was cheap and assembled within 20 minutes. Payday afforded treats like Bertoli's pasta bakes and Stouffer's pizza bread things, and chicken patties on potato rolls with miracle whip. And then one Christmas, when I was living in Bohemian squalor in an art house in a terrible section of town my mom gave me Rachel Ray's 30 Minute Meals. I cooked my way through the book, starting with the pasta section where I felt on firm ground, and skipping anything with olives. I puzzled my way through dilemmas that the book couldn't answer. I remember that her recipes called for putting the onion and garlic in the pan at the same time, and when I did that, the garlic always burned before the onions cooked. I remember putting the question up in a Myspace forum (Google wasn't what it is now) and that horrible, desolate feeling of making yourself vulnerable to the internet and getting no replies. But I worked through it and learned an important lesson: recipes are approximations, and sometimes they lie. Especially about onions. But I digress.

Rachel Ray started, not a chapter, but an epoch of my life. The groundwork had been set, sure. I grew up in a house where good food was valued.  We ate out at fine restaurants with cloth napkins, and I didn't set foot in an Applebees until I was in my 20's. We had home-cooked meals waaaay more often than not. A t.v. dinner was a rare treat, counted on the fingers of a hand in a year. The reason I didn't know how to cook at 23 was because growing up, my grandmother and mother fought for control of the kitchen, they both loved to cook so much, and my sole contribution to feeding the family was occasional cookie baking and sometimes I got to dice the ham for fried rice night, which, I cringe now, but Mama called Flied Lice Night. She also went around calling herself a Strong White Woman for a number of years because she liked the phrase Strong Black Woman so much. Massive cultural shifts leave some people behind. I don't have the time for therapy right now. I digress. There was also, I think, something of an undercurrent of feminism running through my childhood. My mother and grandmother were both determined that I was not going to be a housewife, no sir no way, and so did not teach me any housewifely arts. Everything I know about keeping house I have learned from the internet. Maybe you are like me, in that regard. But Alton Brown's show started the year I got a full time nanny gig, and he and Rachel and later Giada were the nap-time, homework-time backdrop to the end of my teens and my early 20's. And then I got 30 Minute Meals for Christmas and my life veered off in a new direction, of learning and experimenting and trying and failing and trying again.

So if you think you can't cook you should have seen me trying to upgrade to pasta with garlicky olive oil and cheese, and failing, brow furrowed, book in hand.

I'm confitting a bunch of shit this weekend, so I guess you could say I've come far. I have a lot of blind spots, still. I'm not much of a meat eater, so I can't do much with anything that isn't ground beef. But I can make much from little. I can look at the contents of my fridge and make a meal. Because I read a lot of cookbooks and I tried.

So if you think you can't cook, it's because you haven't. I recommend you go to your local library and check out some books. Sally Schneider is a favorite of mine. Mark Bittman is popular. Don't go crazy- your life isn't Julie and Julia or whatever. Pick something solid and easy. Pick a category you know a little about. If you know how to grill a steak start in the beef section and slowly by slowly expand until you get it. Until you know in your bones how to make a roux, a sauce, a reduction. And then you, too, will know how to cook.

Or Blue Apron it for the rest of your life. You do you.