Years ago, on the night before our weekly grocery trip, when food items and meal ideas were running low at home and the dinner hour was looming large, I decided to take matters into my own hands and cook dinner for my family. I had this crazy idea that I would make orange rice and ham, so I typed that into Google for good measure. I was instantly assured that somehow, my makeshift recipe existed, at least in cyberspace. With a surge of confidence and excitement, I kicked everyone out of the kitchen and set to work. I poured orange juice into a pot of rice, added some salt and a half-cup of coriander seeds (the recipe called for coriander leaves, but I knew that every good cook improvises), and set it on the stove. Then, I poured orange juice over some ham slices on a pan and stuck them in the oven. I can still remember how, bursting with pride and joy at the thought of having created something so lovely, so nourishing for my hungry family, I carried bowls of steaming, fluffy rice stained the lightest shade of orange, dotted with green, topped with slices of browned, glazed ham, to the table.
Need I say that the rice was a bland mass of tangible disappointment, punctuated by the frequent, unpleasant crunch of tangy coriander seeds, or that the ham was dry, coated with crystallized, sugary, unappetizing crumbs?
Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.--Charlie Chaplin
Over the next few months, I would repeatedly, stubbornly attempt to have my own way in the kitchen. There was the chalky lemon sauce that I wanted to serve with chicken (I had substituted flour for the requisite cornstarch), the pale-gray brownie-sponges that I made with my cousins (apparently, instant cocoa mix can never replace pounds of real chocolate), an overwhelmingly peanut-buttery Thai chicken (it turns out that heated peanut butter, soy sauce, and pepper taste exactly like hot, liquefied peanut butter), the charred remains of various other dishes, and one ignominious instance, a particularly low moment really, where I quite literally put my mother’s best pots through hell (I had set the oven to pre-heat without emptying it).
Aside from the inevitably disastrous finales to each of those early kitchen adventures, a few constants stand out: my family’s persistent, loving support of each of my abominable creations (my parents ate every last spoonful of my infamous orange rice, while my aunts, uncles, and cousins insisted on eating every little brownie-sponge in the pan, albeit with ice cream), and my own clueless, reckless attitude towards cooking. After a few weeks of self-imposed, embarrassment-driven exile from our kitchen, I would eventually return, again and again, each time with a new Internet-validated recipe to unleash upon my family.
Guard your roving thoughts with a jealous care, for speech is but the dialer of thoughts, and every fool can plainly read in your words what is the hour of your thoughts.--Alfred Lord Tennyson
At the heart of all of this nostalgic, self-deprecating rambling is my desire to share the lessons that I had to learn before I could even call myself a half-decent starter cook. Contrary to the popular mythos of the intuitive chef, learning to cook is a process that requires conscientious effort for most modern, kitchen-orphaned newbies. If one didn't grow up enthralled by a relative's skill in the kitchen, or simply never payed attention, cooking from scratch can be problematic at best, while new media-enabled cooking can be overwhelming. Google searches for recipes yield countless versions of each dish, and none but the most credible websites can make any guarantees about results and quality. Moreover, each one calls for knowledge of distinct techniques (such as braising and broiling) and skills (such as the all-important "knife skills"), and this information, while readily available online, is scattered across the Internet, rarely forming part of recipes. One click necessitates another, with each new page bringing new distractions and the infamous "too much information" or "information overload" effect of the Net Generation. All of which begs the question of whether it's truly possible to learn how to cook from this fragmented, dissociated, and volatile medium--expect more on this topic in the next few days!
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