I don’t au gratin. Or braise, blanche, fricasse, or cassoulet. I have been known to sauté, but those occasions are few, and far between. It’s not that I can’t cook, it’s just that, well, my repertoire is severely limited. I bake, broil and reheat. I can warm, simmer and boil. I’ve got breakfast down-pat. Toast– no problem. Cold cereal – aced. I can make eggs – fried, scrambled, omeletted – in fact, I make my own version of matzoh brei, using oatmeal instead of matzoh. It’s quite tasty and nutritious, and it was born of my own limited culinary imagination. (Until last summer I didn’t even know how to pronounce ‘culinary.’)
My biggest problem is the lack of a general sense of what the hell I am doing. Baking comes easily to me. I know what to put where and when and how to improvise. When I’m cooking, it’s all like a mystery of ingredients and timing that I somehow cannot grasp. My husband never really liked when I cooked, because he’d come home from work and I’d be cursing and throwing things across the kitchen. Substitutions are rare – what do I put in place of red peppers, which I hate? How should I know? Does it have to be red? So that recipe is out the window. And my sense of timing is always off. The vegetables come to the table 10 minutes after everything else, and occasionally, something doesn’t make it to the table at all. Once, I forgot I made garlic bread and left it wrapped in aluminum foil, only to be found petrifying in the oven the next time I made something (which, believe me, wasn’t all that soon.) Come to dinner at my house and the steak is tough, the peas are cold and the mashed potatoes are crunchy. (The salad is good, though.)
It’s not funny. I’m fifty years old and rarely feed my family from scratch. It isn’t even in my brain’s makeup to cook. Every morning comes and goes without my thinking of cooking, and every afternoon, when my daughter asks me, “What’s for dinner?” the question takes me by surprise. I’m thinking, “Damn, didn’t I just feed you yesterday?”
(She bought me a book for my fiftieth birthday – Basic Cooking Techniques. She’s a funny kid.) On the occasions I do cook dinner, my children want to know what’s wrong, and if, heaven help us, I cook more than one night a week, they know the apocalypse is nigh.
I do feed them. I am an expert reheater. The problem is, I have to have something to reheat. So original meals consist of buffet selections from Fairway, take out Chinese, or pizza. Lots and lots of pizza. I’m a bad mother, what can I say? (Hey, if you put spinach on pizza, isn’t that nutrition?)
My mother cooked when I was growing up. I just never paid attention. Once, I tried to be independent and take over making the egg salad. My mother said, “I’ve already boiled the eggs, just mush them together with some mayonnaise and chop in a little celery.” So I did. I took three eggs from the fridge, and followed her directions. It was a slimy, liquid mess. When I brought them to her I said, “This doesn’t look like your egg salad.” She sighed. “That’s because you used raw eggs.”
Ok, so that was my first hint. I actually screwed up in home ec. in seventh grade by mixing up the salt and the sugar. Let’s just say, salt cookies are not a tasty treat.
And my foray into Thanksgiving was a disaster. I don’t know what made me think I could pull it off, but my mother was ill and in no shape to cater or host, so the whole shebang came to my house. Almost time for dinner and I realize the oven isn’t hot and the turkey is only half cooked. Apparently, my oven wasn’t working, but I didn’t know that, seeing as how I never used the damn thing. Thankfully (since it was a day for giving thanks) I was able to jiggle the heating element and get it going again, but to say dinner was late is putting it mildly. Everyone swore it was delicious, but really??? My FIRST Thanksgiving and the oven conks out?
Oh, wait. I have to cut this short. It’s 5:47 and I haven’t the faintest idea what’s for dinner. . .
