When I was younger, I was thoroughly enamored with cooking. To a large part, I imagine, my curiosity must have stemmed from the sheer volume of food preparation I bore witness to in my short lifetime, but I also like to think that some of that interest must have come from the unique variety of flavors and methods that shaped my early childhood food experiences. Between my mom’s fairly traditional fare like meatloaf and lasagna (usually made with help from store bought conveniences like shredded cheese and jarred sauce) to my oftentimes live-in Grandmother’s (made from scratch to the point of being one step away from slaughtering your own goat…and sometimes, not even that) Persian cooking - the latter of which usually began in the late morning or early afternoon in order for food to be ready at dinnertime – there was an astonishing amount of variety in both the foods themselves and the styles of preparation.
Before
reaching double digits, I had made my first solo ventures into cooking. Nothing particularly taxing - mostly just
cookies and cakes from box mixes - but that never stopped me from feeling
particularly awesome and skilled while doing it. Despite the fact that my personal attempts at cooking essentially
amounted to a lot of egg cracking and stirring, I began to think of myself as
the next Julia Child. Standing in the
kitchen whooping and hollering and generally exclaiming to my imaginary
audience about the tremendous FUN I was having and how FRESH and NATURAL the
unidentifiable pile of dust that I had just dumped out of a box of cake mix
was; I was breathtaking.
As
I grew older, I began to regularly peruse my mother’s small shelf of
cookbooks. Immediately I ran headlong
into my first set of culinary roadblocks:
a complete lack of interest in details (Was that one teaspoon or one
tablespoon? How about we just pour some
in and call it a day?) and an unwillingness to listen to authority. (Heat on medium for ten minutes. Whatever.
Medium is for pansies. Let’s
crank this sucker up!) The unfortunate
result of this mental block was that, though I did pick through them for hours
on end with a combination of deep fascination and overwhelming boredom, the
task was never quite embarked upon with the mental discipline to be considered
studying or learning. Rather, I think I
could best describe my intentions as a fervent attempt to soak up their
knowledge through skin contact and desperate, clammy want. I learned very little.
With
this tremendous vault of knowledge and experience tucked into my pocket like a
treasured ball of gritty lint, I thus headed off to college to find my way in
the great big culinary world. A short
time later, after a number of efforts that I’d like to think provided ample
entertainment value to make up for what they lacked in edibility. I decided that there were abundant
opportunities to be had in life for amusement and that, while I was definitely
enjoying the chuckles, what I really wanted was something to eat. Carefully considering my options, I decided
that the first thing to be done in this situation was to figure out what all
the herbs and spices tasted like. (It
does occur to me now that this may not actually be most people’s logical first
step in learning how to cook, but then again, I don’t recall ever claiming to
be logical.) And thus began the
experiment that led to the first even remotely palatable recipe I ever pulled
out of my ass (Please, don’t visualize this.).
I called it…grassy chicken.
Essentially it consisted entirely of chicken “sautéed” (on high) in a dry
pan, then sprinkled with lemon juice and enough dry herbage to make a
respectable salad. Each piece was
completely coated with a thick layer of coarse roughage. It tasted…fibery.
To
Be Continued
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