(no subject)
Sometimes it takes me an embarrassingly long time to make very simple realizations, but I'm especially ashamed of the fact that it took me twenty-five years to figure out the basic, indisputable fact that cooking is awesome. It's even more embarrassing when you consider that there has always been a special place in my heart for gluttony. I guess, looking back, I'd always just assumed myself too incompetent to cook anything that would taste good. That, and I was kind of intimidated by the vocabulary of cooking, with words like "broil" and "saute" which, though I'd heard and seen them plenty of times, I wouldn't have been able to define until pretty recently. Regardless of the underlying reasons, until a few months ago, my cooking was restricted to typical college-guy dishes like, say, frozen pizza.
Well, I was finally inspired to start to attempt cooking beyond the level of mac 'n' cheese by my roommate, who makes fantastic stuff, and has the enviable skill to cook an entire week's worth of meals at one time. I, of course, have started out a bit simpler than that, but I've still been pretty happy with the results. One thing that has been of considerable help to me has been a very simple, but valuable, feature at the grocery store. Each week, they feature a recipe in their weekly circular ads. Samples and recipe cards are available in the store, and they put all the ingredients together on the same shelf if you want to make it yourself. A pretty simple idea, but I've never seen any other grocery store do this. Honestly, I find it kind of surprising that no one else thought of this first, or that no other store that I've been to has copied it -- the ingredients typically sell very well. The recipes themselves are well-chosen, too, usually taking not much over half an hour to make, and the ones I've tried have been consistently tasty. (In fact, they have kindly made their archive of recipes available online here.) So there you have it -- a good idea to steal if you ever start your own grocery store.
I suppose the two things that have surprised me most about cooking are:
1. It really is easy, if you're just following recipes. If an incompetent oaf like me can do it, anyone can do it. Seriously. Anyone.
2. How much creativity there can be in cooking, even for a novice like me. One of the first things my roommate taught me is to trust your instincts, and it has yielded pretty good results. Actually, my roommate, when following recipes, never uses measuring cups and never follows the cooking times listed, just going by feel. I don't trust myself enough yet to do that, but I do add and subtract ingredients at will, and sure enough, it usually comes out pretty much the way I was expecting and hoping it to.
And finally there's what is, to me, the greatest mystery of cooking: How can things like mayonnaise and sour cream, which taste so utterly foul when eaten by themselves or as toppings, become so delicious when used as an ingredient in a recipe? The nearly-universal rule of "garbage in, garbage out" seems to be violated here. I don't think I'll ever get it.
P.S. Oh yeah, remember how I promised to keep looking for more information on fan death? Well, after extensive search all over the internet, I think I've finally gotten to the bottom of it. This schematic diagram really gives a fantastic summary of how fan death works in the minds of Koreans. Case closed.
Well, I was finally inspired to start to attempt cooking beyond the level of mac 'n' cheese by my roommate, who makes fantastic stuff, and has the enviable skill to cook an entire week's worth of meals at one time. I, of course, have started out a bit simpler than that, but I've still been pretty happy with the results. One thing that has been of considerable help to me has been a very simple, but valuable, feature at the grocery store. Each week, they feature a recipe in their weekly circular ads. Samples and recipe cards are available in the store, and they put all the ingredients together on the same shelf if you want to make it yourself. A pretty simple idea, but I've never seen any other grocery store do this. Honestly, I find it kind of surprising that no one else thought of this first, or that no other store that I've been to has copied it -- the ingredients typically sell very well. The recipes themselves are well-chosen, too, usually taking not much over half an hour to make, and the ones I've tried have been consistently tasty. (In fact, they have kindly made their archive of recipes available online here.) So there you have it -- a good idea to steal if you ever start your own grocery store.
I suppose the two things that have surprised me most about cooking are:
1. It really is easy, if you're just following recipes. If an incompetent oaf like me can do it, anyone can do it. Seriously. Anyone.
2. How much creativity there can be in cooking, even for a novice like me. One of the first things my roommate taught me is to trust your instincts, and it has yielded pretty good results. Actually, my roommate, when following recipes, never uses measuring cups and never follows the cooking times listed, just going by feel. I don't trust myself enough yet to do that, but I do add and subtract ingredients at will, and sure enough, it usually comes out pretty much the way I was expecting and hoping it to.
And finally there's what is, to me, the greatest mystery of cooking: How can things like mayonnaise and sour cream, which taste so utterly foul when eaten by themselves or as toppings, become so delicious when used as an ingredient in a recipe? The nearly-universal rule of "garbage in, garbage out" seems to be violated here. I don't think I'll ever get it.
P.S. Oh yeah, remember how I promised to keep looking for more information on fan death? Well, after extensive search all over the internet, I think I've finally gotten to the bottom of it. This schematic diagram really gives a fantastic summary of how fan death works in the minds of Koreans. Case closed.
