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July 29, 2006
The Key To Success In The Kitchen Is Being In The Kitchen
I am listing to a wonderful cooking show, Jim Coleman's A Chef's Table, while I am making dinner. Jim just said, "The key to success in the kitchen is getting the freshest ingredients." I'll agree that fresh ingredients make a difference. But when people ask me how I became a good cook, I answer that I just cooked a lot.
I am mostly self-taught. I learned some from my mom, quite a bit from my dad and step-mother. I read cookbooks cover to cover like novels, never following a recipe exactly but grabbing ideas from each to put together in a way I find appealing. I started cooking when I got my first apartment in college, back when my roommate Samantha and I used to make a cranberry apricot pie so successful that our friends started calling it Samberry Aprilcot pie. I kept cooking.
I've always loved combining food and love, and most of my love stories involve food. Bell peppers stuffed with basil, goat cheese and tomato for my vegetarian boyfriend Jon in college... collard greens, beans and rice with the student activist boy I had a crush on the summer after I graduated when we were living in the big activist commune... gazpacho, salsa, and pasta sauces with the unbelievable sungold tomatoes that our friends David and Rachel of Full Moon Farms used to grow organically just outside Burlington, Vermont. Food and love are inextricably intertwined, not just over the medium term but forever.
I used to dream about a vegan cardiologist who would join me in a movement to cure heart disease, Ornish-style. Then I discovered that a no-fat diet was impossible to maintain long term, and I started eating eggwhites, flax oil and olive oil and feeling better than I ever imagined possible, not to mention easily maintaining a weight that is "underweight" for my height, and a calorie level that I hope will slow my biological aging process. Enter the Orange One. Now I have a tester for my ever culinary whim. I get better every day. Just last night, MR was amazed at how well the flavors in the sunshine platter I made him melded together, each bringing out the other.
Good cooking is a result of cooking. If you want to be good, just keep doing it. Get in the kitchen and have a good time. You've got to eat anyway!
Posted by april at July 29, 2006 4:47 PM
Comments
If you want to be good, just keep doing it.
This is something important to remember. One of the gifts that a greatly expanded lifespan will give us is the ability to spend 10 or 30 or 100 years on becoming really really good at something "just because".
People with their "mayfly lives" often spend so much time trying to make ends meet that they don't ever live up to their full potential.
Posted by: gregg m. at July 30, 2006 8:43 PM