Insecure Cook

I am an insecure cook. I am no longer afraid to say it. Here's why: this morning while I was washing and bleaching my produce that I bought yesterday but didn't have the energy to deal with until today, I realized that the lettuce-looking thing that I was washing probably has a name. But I have no idea what. I never saw this stuff before I moved here. And on menus here (which are sometimes all in French, mind you) they often mention something called rocket. I have learned that to be something leafy like where we would mention lettuce. So maybe what I am washing is rocket? But I don't think so. I think rocket looks more like spinach leaves. But at the grocery store the produce is labeled in Arabic or French (helpful since these are my 4th and 5th languages respectively--and you can't really count French as "one of my languages", since I've only learned it in the context of 1. greeting my French neighbors, 2. deciphering menus here 3. reading road signs and 4. grocery shopping). So, back to my cooking insecurity. It all started back in college, when, with the help of a few bewildered moments in Sandie Anderson's kitchen, I realized, I didn't know how to cook (because Sandie does, and not knowing what half of the tools in her kitchen were for made it painfully evident that I in fact did not). There were a few occasions on which this fact was even more proven. Baking for the Challenge fundraising auctions (I eventually auctioned art instead of food-much easier), cooking dinner for small group (so much pressure-trying to display your woman skills and eligibility for all of those wonderful men who are in small group with you!), etc. . . .

Now I lived in the dorms until my Jr. year, so that's when it really sunk in. I went from being fed 3 squares a day, to needing to not only buy my own groceries on a limited budget, but to make something from those groceries that I could eat. I must take a moment here and state that my lack of knowledge about cooking should in no way reflect poorly on my mother's mothering skills. She is amazing. One of my favorite people in all the world. She is also a wonderful cook and today, I use many of her recipes regularly (at least the ones I'm not afraid of). I came to college knowing a lot of important things. I grew up baking and am very comfortable with things like chocolate chip cookies and cakes and the likes. But a person just can't live on that stuff. So i knew I needed a cookbook. Somehow the cookbook I ended up with was a Southern Living cookbook full of gorgeous pictures, and nothing I could afford to make and nothing I was brave enough to try. Looking back, I'm not sure how I survived. I honestly don't remember cooking an actual meal one single time. I'm pretty sure that my roommates fed me all year (thank you Sarah, Krista, Jess and Meg!!).

So then I moved back into the dorms. Glory. All I could eat, and I still hadn't really learned how to cook. Then I graduated from college and moved to China. At which point I again realized, I didn't really know how to cook. Now let me make a suggestion to the reader here: don't try to learn to cook cross-culturally and bilingually. It makes it way harder. Depending on where you live, it may be cheaper, but I promise you, it will make it way harder. A beginning cook should be able to focus all of his or her energies on the actual process of cooking, rather than issues like, what is this meat that I am holding, and why didn't I try harder to learn to read Chinese characters so that I could recognize which kind of "roe" this is? Beef? Pork? Something else? You can imagine.

So I spent 2 years there, "baking" in a toaster oven, learning to love tofu (i learned to make some great smoothies with almond milk powder and tofu!!), and mostly eating out at the cheapest and most delicious restaurants in all the world. Disclaimer: at this point in my life, the internet was still a relatively new thing (at least for me) so going online to learn to cook, or at least to get recipes was not even a thought on my horizon. I think at least a fourth of my communication with my mom during this season involved me emailing her for a recipe or for some instruction about how to cook this or that. Lesson learned from this season? If you don't know how to do it in English, you probably won't be able to ask someone for it in Chinese. I could go on and on about buying meat that is cut from a huge carcass in an open market, or talk about the produce market with the surly country women who weigh your goods on a little handheld scale, or the fish tanks full of sea delights that I was afraid of, or the bins of live creatures (like silk worms), but we don't have time for that here. We still have years of cooking insecurity to cover.

Next stop: marriage and Georgia. Shortly after returning to the states, I got hitched to my beaux and my mom gave me the gift of a lifetime. A cookbook that included all of the recipes that she cooks on a regular basis. Like normal everyday kind of meals. And meals my family loves and eats all the time. Like her enchiladas. Or her meatloaf. Stuff that is simple, fast, and affordable. Pretty sure she still gives this amazing gift as a wedding gift to others. You should invite her to your wedding just to get the cookbook. The husband and I lived in Georgia for about 2 1/2 years and I continued to try to learn to cook. I called my mom on my cell phone from the grocery and while I was cooking to get her help. I even cooked Thanksgiving dinner for my mother and sister-in-law the first year that Matt and I were married (scary! We weren't poisoned by the under done turkey, but it was touch and go there for a while). Armed with easy access to my mom, grocery stores full of English, and Real Simple magazine, I expanded my repertoire and even had people over for the occasional meal without totally melting down.

Then we moved to the Middle East. Before we left the U.S., I carefully scanned every page of my cookbook (which had now gotten much fatter as a result of the recipes I found in Real Simple). The original was too heavy and big to be included in our very limited luggage, so I gave it to my sister (because hey, let's all acknowledge that the gift of a cookbook when you get married is awesome, but don't we all need to know how to feed ourselves before that momentous event? anyway . . . ) Once settled in our new country, I took my gazillion scanned files to a print shop where they opened each file (because I had done it wrong and every page of the cookbook was it's own file--whoops) and printed it. I got a weird binder with only 2 rings ('cause when you live in a place like that, you take what you can get) and lots of page protectors, and loaded it up. Now all I had to do was learn to communicate in Arabic so I could buy the food to cook all of those great meals! Yippee. We'll fast forward through that year, because it resembles the two spent in China. Weird foods that you can't recognize. Trying to communicate what I wanted to the beef guy or the veggie guy (in what must equal the vocabulary of a toddler), learning to cook on a gas stove, learning to think in kilos and grams, and learning (again) how to make almost everything from scratch. With dial-up internet, and one computer between my hubby and I, getting tips for cooking online, again, was not real feasible.

As if we needed another change of scenery, after about a year in that kind of third world-ish place, we then moved to another country. The country we live in now. (sorry, I know I'm being cryptic) It's neighbors with the last place and they speak the same language (except here they throw in French as a 3rd language just for fun). It's only a few hours by bus from where we lived before to where we live now, but it's kind of like comparing Kansas to someplace like New York (though I've never been, I hear it's great). This place is very westernized/developed (in most things). Here I shop at a supermarket instead of a market. Here I buy cake mixes and ranch dressing packets and even refried beans in a can! I no longer hand roll my own tortillas or make my own tortilla chips (like I did in China). I can buy cheese readily (although cottage cheese and sour cream still do not exist here, I have faith that someday they will). And I (kind of) speak the language(s). And we have a car to go get the groceries! And we have high(ish) speed internet (as long as we have electricity . . . ), and I have discovered allrecipes.com! I have even learned how to cook for large groups of people (our house church eats together once a month and we rotate who hosts this momentous event, so I've learned to occassionally even cook for a crowd!). Cooking insecurity, why do you linger?

The most recent addition to my arsenal is a woman named Lee Drummond (a.k.a. The Prarie Woman, find her here). My mom kept telling me about her blog and I just didn't connect (I still hadn't learned to blog or how to follow blogs yet). And then many of you had links to her blog, or you stood in line for hours to get her to sign your cookbook that she just recently published. Still not convinced I wandered over to her site because someone told me she had photography tips on her site, and that was the clincher for me. Anyone who can explain aperture so that I can understand it will be my friend for life. She inspired this post today. Because her recipes come with a detailed step by step, INCLUDING MANY PICTURES, I am going to try to make pot roast from the slab of meat that I brought home from the store yesterday, that may or may not be the right kind of meat. So this insecure cook trudges on. I've got to go finish washing the green leafy stuff in my sink. We'll let you know how the pot roast goes . . .