We could not have been luckier to find Ali, our current babysitter who comes twice a week in the afternoons while I attempt to piece together a freelance career. Beyond the fact that Ali has a clean driving record, always shows up on time, texts me with we’re-at-piano status updates all day long (no such thing as TMI in my house), and is generally great with the girls, she is from a family of professional educators and she herself is a student, getting her masters in special education. If homework hour with her at the helm is any indication, she is well on her way to graduating summa cum laude.
But here’s where my luck is ratcheted up to I-won-the-lottery levels: She is in her 20s and wants to learn how to cook! Well, at least I think she wants to learn how to cook. It’s also entirely possible that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with cooking and is merely humoring me because what choice does she have when her new employer a) leaves the Jim Lahey pizza crust recipe for her to assemble on her first day of work b) gives her a box set of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks for a holiday gift and c) thrusts a Dinner: A Love Story galley in her backpack with the instructions that I need her feedback — good and bad — immediately.
Whether she wants to learn or not, she’s proving to be as good a student as she is a homework tutor. She mastered that life-changing Lahey crust on her first try. After the holiday she reported back with praise for Ina Garten, in particular the super simple zucchini with Parmesan recipe in Barefoot Contessa: Family Style. And — always the hallmark of a star student — she asks a lot of questions. Like: Is it OK to use parsley in guacamole instead of cilantro since they look so similar? (Not OK) Or: If I want to make sugar cookies, do I just leave out the chocolate chips in my chocolate chip cookie recipe? (No.) And, perhaps my favorite, the answer to which she figured out on her own: Is it OK if I use an American oven instead of a Dutch Oven called for in so many of the recipes in the DALS book?
I can write this without feeling mean because all of these questions are exactly the kind of questions I asked when I was her age, when I wouldn’t have ever been able to identify a Dutch Oven; when I bypassed recipes in my Silver Palate because they called for an exotic ingredient called chicken stock; When I went to Chanterelle in downtown Manhattan and almost ordered sweetbreads thinking they were some form of glazed pastries.
My Uncle Mike, a loyal reader of this blog (as well as a recipient of a 2011 Dolly Award), emailed Andy and me last week to tell us a story about how, back in the early 80s, when he was teaching himself how to cook, he decided to make a whole fish with coriander from his brand new Time-Life Middle Eastern cookbook. For a dinner party. “Of course, I had no idea that there was such a thing as fresh coriander/cilantro,” he wrote. “Not even sure I could have found it then, but the recipe called for a cup of coriander. So I went out and bought three bottles of dried coriander leaves and used it on top of the fish while it cooked.” No one at the dinner party commented. “Maybe they didn’t know better, and since the fish was not skinned, you could kinda push the mass away with the skin, but still a frightening memory.”
I could hear stories about these frightening memories all day long, and in the interest of teaching Ali the most important lesson — that you can only learn how to cook by actually cooking, even if it means you feel lost or screw up every now and then — how about you guys share a few?
Oh, the mentor… I´ve never had one. I should have tried cooking with my mom while I still lived with my parents, but she really cooks as if she were a grand chef who doesn´t want her recipes stolen. No measures, no clear directions, “you just take a look at it and give or take”, which is impossible to repeat by someone else. I´ve spoiled far too much food trying to follow her instructions in vain. So… I left home without having a clue on how things work, you know? How water, oil and flour become dough, and how water, oil, flour and eggs become batter (I´ve figured that one out, at last). Vegetables are still quite mysterious, and I only know two ways to cook chicken and four for cow meat. I´m still clueless with any other stock, and thoroughly disgusted by organs or anything that comes from the sea.
I think I would be a much better cook if I had shared the kitchen with my mom. But I´ve been finding my way around cookbooks for a decade, and I´m happy to report that I´ve mastered a thing or two. Hopefully.
When making a chocolate cake in my early 20s, the recipe called for butternilk. I didn’t have any, so I just substituted the skim milk we had in the fridge. The cake was so dry- and we didn’t even have any milk to drink with it since I’d used it up in the recipe.
i love this post. when i moved into my first apartment in college, i decided i would learn to cook. my biggest failures have been when i’ve invited friends over for dinner, and always wanting to impress them with mad skills, tried to cook something i’d never made before or trying to cook too many complicated recipes for one meal. now, i’m married, and my husband always asks me before having guests over for dinner, “you’re not going to make anything too crazy, are you?”
i’ve also made squishy, gross textured eggplant a number of times and i originally thought that baking powder and baking soda were interchangeable. too much baking soda in any baked good is absolutely gross. i’ve made that mistake multiple times.
The American/Dutch oven question made me laugh out loud at my desk! My best learning moment – when I tried to make mashed potatoes in the food processor to “speed things up.” My husband (then boyfriend) smiled, said he thought it tasted interesting, and offered to run out to get a different side dish.
My first attempt at making a red velvet cake was a disaster. I was in a hurry, making the cake for Thanksgiving dessert. Instead of adding 1 tsp of vinegar, I added one cup. My husband knew something was wrong before I did. Luckily, no one had a chance to taste it. At least the cream cheese frosting was awesome!!!
I think tsp vs. tbls is what gives my husband & me problems most of the time. Twice we have misread tsp for tbls in recipes involving red pepper flakes…the results were tasty but almost too hot to eat.
When I was in my early 20s, I had been invited to a holiday party, and I said I would make an appetizer. I chose an onion dip, and since I did not have a food processor at the time, used a blender. About half way through I decided the sides needed to be scraped down, but did so while the blade was still running (what could be wrong with this time-saving method?). When I brought the spatula back up, most of the plastic had been chewed off – egads! Needless to say, I bought an appetizer at store.
the coriander story reminds me of my own. I was 11 years old and taking a home ec. class (yes, they had home ec. in the 80s). We made delicious cupcakes from scratch, and the frosting from scratch too! So that weekend I decided to recreate it from the copious notes I took the week prior. A family friend was coming over to visit. I had no idea what “confectioners sugar” was. I figured sugar was sugar and as long it was sweet we were good to go so I used what we had, which was granulated.
I had no idea why my frosting was not stiffening so stuck the frosted, melting cupcakes in the fridge. The family friend came over and we ate cold, crunchy cupcakes. She said a kind word about the cupcake and asked if I used granulated sugar and I told her I didn’t know and showed her. She chuckled and explained the difference.
Back in the olden days (early ’70s), I was attempting to make yeast bread for the first time. Had no idea what I was doing. The recipe must have said, “beat the dough….blah, blah.” I thought they meant with an old-fashioned egg beater. I think I actually ran out and bought one! Well, the egg beater OBVIOUSLY didn’t work – what a mess. I think my boyfriend (soon to be husband) suggested I use a wooden spoon. Did we even HAVE wooden spoons back then? The bread turned out ok.
Aw man! In a”creative” and “healthy” moment, I decided to use an awesomely purple cauliflower I bought at the neighborhood farmer’s market as a subsitute for (half) the potatoes in a potato/cauliflower mash. The outcome: delicious but ugly and gray. Mushy gray food… yum?
My worst flop was when I was in graduate school hosting a dinner party for my architecture studio of 12. I decided to make individual chocolate souffles, baking them in a water bath. Something went wrong along the way and they never set. I just scooped them into champagne flutes, topped with a raspberry each and called it chocolate mousse!
My most infamous kitchen “whoops” was while attempting to make rice. I had added olive oil to the water like the back of the box called for, presumably to prevent sticking. I walked away from the stove for a lot longer than I meant t. When I returned and took the lid off the pot, all the water had boiled away and the remaining olive oil caught on fire and sent up a fire ball that burned the front of my hair, my eyebrows and my eyelashes. The week before my senior prom. My eyelashes and eyebrows recovered. The front of my hair still has a weird cowlick. and now I buy my rice, microwavable from Trader Joe’s.
Can I tell one on my sister? She got into making yogurt a while back. She would mix up the starter and the milk and put it in a plastic yogurt tub, then set it in her oven which she’d turned on for a few minutes, and then off, and let the residual heat do its job.
One afternoon, when I was visiting, we smelt something bad, and I do mean bad!
She’d forgotten about the yogurt, and turned the oven to pre-heat for something else she was making. Hot sour milk and melted plastic – mmm, mmm, (not) good!
When I started to get into cooking, I happened to have a boss at the time who was a big cook. I specifically remember asking her what a dutch oven was because it was mentioned in so many recipes.
I was also often confused about the names of different cuts of meat. I mean, I could identify ground beef and cuts of chicken. Anything else and I would break into a cold sweat at the meat case.
When making homemade burnt caramel icing it’s best to use a giant pot. Otherwise when you add the burnt sugar to the milk/sugar mixture it will boil over leaving you standing in the kitchen with burnt caramel and sugar on your stove screaming “It’s not going to work!” while you scramble to find any bigger pot to pour the scalding hot icing in. It’s only once you do find a pot and get everything going again that you realize you broke the candy thermometer in the midst of all the insanity.
You are such a great writer, it is a pleasure to read about cooking and food while laughing!
Learn as you go is how I have prepared hundreds of terrible meals, only to be reward with dozens of spectacular dinners. The key is remembering the good ones 🙂
One year for Christmas I received the cookbook, The Gourmet Slow Cooker. After grinding the spices by hand one morning before work, I realized I was running really late. I asked my husband to add 2 cans of chiles in adobo (Recipe called for 2 chiles, not 2 cans). He asked if I was sure it was 2 cans. Irritated I snapped back, why do you always have to question me? Man was I sorry. The dinner was not even edible despite loads of sour cream and cheese. Rightly so, my husband will never let me forget that one…
Oh, I am SO glad we’re not the only people with le creuset pots that aren’t pristinely clean 🙂
When I was in 4th grade I decided that I was going to be the chef and make a big fancy dinner for my family . . . I went through my mom’s cookbooks and chose the ‘fanciest’ thing I could find, Chicken Cacciatore 🙂
It was all going well until the recipe called for 1.5 cups of chicken bouillon – and I added 1.5 cups worth of chicken bouillon cubes. I thought it was so stupid that they were individually packaged when you need so many cubes for just one recipe!
My sister and I engaged in a number of unsupervised baking experiments when we were kids. (Curiously, she was always the one to initiate them, although later, as we grew up, she lost much of her interest in baking and cooking, while I got really into it.)
One time we tried to make meringues, and for some reason when we put them in the oven, the individual pastries all melted into one giant meringue that filled the entire baking sheet from end to end and had to be scraped off…
Another time we wanted to cook something out of an international cookbook that my mom owned, and settled on donuts (this was a Russian translation of an East German cookbook, and the donuts were in the American cuisine section). These particular donuts were supposed to be baked, not fried. Anyway, we followed the recipe precisely, but left out the baking soda… Needless to say, the donuts came out completely flat and had the consistency of hardtack. My dad actually compared them to ceramic tiles. He ended up taking them to work, where he and his colleagues dipped them into daily their afternoon tea and slowly but surely worked through the entire batch.
When I was an undergraduate, I lived with my three best friends. We decided to pool our grocery money so we could learn to cook by each cooking something once a week. Needless to say, we each cooked up something hilariously terrible at least once. I remember I once made something with anise in it, without knowing what anise tasted like, and we all hated it. Another time a roommate made chicken cordon bleu and used colored toothpicks to hold it together. When it was done the colors has leaked onto the chicken where the toothpicks had been; tasted fine, but looked like confetti chicken – gross! Fortunately we all knew we were learning so we just laughed about our kitchen disasters.
Late to this comment game but reading my way through the archives. In high school, I took a cooking class and wanted to replicate a friend’s mint brownies. Asked the teacher to buy the ingredient list but she came back and said she couldn’t buy Creme de Menthe for a minor/student. I hadn’t realized it was alcohol-just thought Cream of Mint like Cream of Mushroom. She got me peppermint extract instead and not understanding that alcohol cooks off in recipes, I used the entire 3 T bottle in my brownies. Toothpasty brownies ensued, luckily a hungry senior student came in and ate the entire batch for me before my embarrassment was made known.
When my parents were visiting us in Colorado a couple of summers ago, we went up to the mountains for a relaxing weekend. I was really getting more and more into cooking and wanted to show them my favorite new recipes I had found. I made the chocolate pudding pie from Homesick Texan’s grandma’s recipe, something I have come to serve after bbq in the summer. My dad loves salt. He tried the pie first and didn’t say anything, I tried it and the meringue tasted like pure salt – my dad piped in that he thought the pie strangely tasted kind of salty! We laughed about it and later on, looking through the photos of the weekend, there is actually a photo of me mistakenly putting 5T of salt into the meringue instead of sugar, it’s hilarious.
I laughed out loud when I read this…..during my first solo cooking experience in college, I attempted to thaw a frozen chicken breast by putting it in the microwave…for seven minutes…on high power. It came out about the size of my thumb and looked like a chicken finger. It was awful! My mom still tells people this story.