It's not that I don't enjoy entertaining or having people over and if you cooked me something out of a jar, I'd be grateful, I just get too self conscious. I'm afraid you're going to take one look at what I'm preparing and turn your nose up. Or worse, push your food around your plate and leave hungry. That's what happens when you come from a family of people who really know what they're doing in the kitchen--people who know what ramekins are for and how to use them. Last year Rachel Ray made her gnocchi recipe look so easy my toddler could accomplish it.
Rachel Ray's a liar.
After a long day of work I made a special trip to the store to get the ingredients. It was a disaster. I ended up throwing away my oddly discolored potatoes and wasted eggs in the trash. A friend of mine who is married to a French baker and is an accomplished cook herself tried to make me feel better by telling me gnocchi is hard to make, but I still felt like a failure.
When I was growing up my step-dad, Alan, or Chef Muck as I liked to call him, had my little brother and I prepare and cook a fancy meal for the rest of the family. He had us prepare an appetizer, main dish, and dessert. I have no idea what I made, but I do remember the dessert. It was vanilla bean ice cream which seemed unique to my adolescent taste buds in itself, but we topped it with a raspberry Grand Marnier sauce. I will never forget the taste of that sauce. It felt like the first time my mouth had come alive from a flavor.
My brother made us sushi, and I only remember that because there's a photo of him dressed in a Japanese headband holding a platter of sushi rolls. He married a chef, so it seems he too had the idea of eating good food impressed on him.
My step-mother, Stella, also had an affinity for cooking. She was Assyrian and introduced me to foods most American kids my age never try. She used to put me in charge of mixing the hamburger meat and making the hamburger patties. I can still smell the oddly comforting scent of ground beef mixed with salt, pepper, and every once in awhile, dried onion soup mix. Even during those years of middle school and high school when I became a vegetarian after watching a film in science class that went behind the scenes of a meatpacking factory, she kept me in charge of the meat mixing. Truth be told, I enjoyed it. To this day I have yet to taste Baklava that can compare to hers.
I am decent at cleverly frosting cupcakes and I do make some yummy banana swirl Nutella muffins. I once made an entire vegetable garden out of cupcakes, candy and other edible items that I molded to look like little heads of lettuce (conrflakes coated in pale green frosting), and carrots complete with a "just pulled from the ground" look (molded Starbursts rubbed with cinnamon).
These aren't the ones I made but they looked exactly like this.
Photo Credit to Jacqueline Bianche
However if you asked me to make Cornish games hens, wait, that's it! I honestly just remembered what I made for my meal all those years ago--Cornish game hens. Maybe I'm not as inept in the kitchen as I thought.
A few years ago my mother-in-law gave me Martha Stewart's Cooking School book as a gift. Most would have taken it as a hint, which I'm sure it partially was, but it was the first time a cookbook actually answered the questions most novice cooks are too embarrassed to ask. How do you properly steam an asparagus and the likes. I still call and ask her things like, "How long and what temperature for a yam?" I'm sure she's lost hope for me in the kitchen.
But it doesn't mean I won't trust my culinary abilities in the future. In fact, I will make it a point to cook new things. Most importantly, I will try to impress upon my daughter the joys of cooking so that one day, she won't be intimidated by ramekins and Tarte Tatins.
On my first attempt at cooking with my daughter, I had her make couscous and although she was very proud of herself and loved that she was able to help in the process of making dinner, I felt like we should take the next step and be more adventurous than a boxed item.
The next week I decided to let her brown her own ground turkey for the spaghetti sauce. She sat there patiently, watching it change colors and flipping it around every once in awhile. I was surprised at how much attention she gave the whole process. The best part was when she took the leftovers to school the next day and beamed with pride when her teacher and friends found out that she had made it herself.
So the sauce was from a jar, but she cooked the ground turkey to go in it!
Cooking with my daughter sort of feels like I get a second chance. I can start easy and no one is expecting a culinary masterpiece from a three year old. I may never be the kind of cook that others seek tips from or treasured recipes but for the time being I do have one adoring fan who thinks I'm a culinary genius.
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