If I Can Do It...

This post really was inevitable. I made the big deal about how I couldn’t cook. I think I even mentioned that I really didn’t care to learn how to cook. I’ve gone damned near 30 years now and people have been kind enough to cook for me. When they haven’t, I’ve let the miracle of processed food do the work (see my ever expanding stomach for proof).

So, I bothered to write about how I can’t cook and how my little shopping trip for the boyfriend stressed me out. I really thought that’d be about the end of it. Instead, I got lots of encouragement (which was appreciated) and aversion therapy.

You see, the boyfriend is kind of fantastic. He’s been/is a source of face your shit, deal with it and come out the other side a better person. When I’m inclined to be stagnant, he’s a motivator and just generally makes me a better person. So, he starts to give me a little prodding with comments like “Ya know, you ARE off today and I’m at work.” And so, at 11:33am today, I decided that I was going to make dinner.

This is not a decision that I came to lightly.

I then sat around wondering what in the world I would make. I thought about lots of things that were basically frozen food. I thought about going to Fresh Market and getting one of their prepared things that you just heat. I also thought about doing the Bisquick “Oven Fried Chicken”. However, none of those felt “special”. After running out to do a couple of other errands, I came back and continued to stress out and peruse the internet.

It was at 3:42pm (note the time I spent stressing about this) that I decided to leave it all up to fate. I decided that I was going to turn on the Rachel Ray talk show and whatever she was making, that’s what I was going to make for dinner. I figured that her recipes were for the causal home cook and if she could do it, then by God I could too.

It turns out that Rachel was featuring her best of 2009 recipes and was doing a spin on one of them for 2010 (always up with the times, that Rachel). And so, she was making a Spinach, Artichoke and Chicken Penne dish. I watched her make it and for the first time in my life had an “I can do that” moment while watching food television. I promptly found the recipe, printed and set off to DiscoKroger.

I will spare you lots of detail, but here’s what I’ve learned: Rachel does NOT make stuff in 30 minutes. If I had a whole team of people to chop, pour, stir and generally keep an eye on stuff, then great. I could make Thanksgiving dinner in 30 minutes. Her pasta dish, not so much. Those spices that she calls for just a pinch of...yeah...those are expensive. I spent $20 today on bay leaves and fresh nutmeg and I’m pretty sure that they didn’t add anything to the dish.

However, on a non-cynical note: I cooked. I for real, took some stuff and made it into food. How frickin’ cool is that? I didn’t know it, but the boyfriend tells me that I poached, made a roux, turned that into a beschamel and then combined all of that into a pretty tasty dish. So hot damn!!!

I recognize that none of this is earth shattering or “gourmet”. However, it’s a decent first step for a total novice. I will also say, it was kinda tasty. The best part? While we were cleaning up, the boyfriend said “No one’s ever cooked for me before”. That moment when I melted just a little, made the 5 hours of stress totally worth it.

Good Eats

I am not a food gay. Let me repeat that, I am NOT a food gay.

That’s not to say that I don’t like to eat. You can look at me and tell that isn’t quite the case; it’s just that food confuses and frustrates me.

I grew up with a working, single mom who still managed to get dinner on the table every night. However, that dinner might have came in a box or it might have been Shake and Bake, but I never helped. I just never picked up how to turn ingredients into food.

Cooking is a skill and an art that I have yet to and will never master. Part of that is an innate desire to want to please people, so having a “test kitchen” run at making people dinner is not an option. I will not serve people bad food. The stress of just thinking about cooking for a group of friends (who I know love me and would only judge me a little) completely blocks me from being able to get started cooking.

It’s also SO daunting. I hang around with people who talk about cooking and food as though it’s as natural as signing your name or knowing the alphabet. They all know the difference between various kinds of cuts and how best to prepare this or that and what spices provide what flavor. I can tell you that the V8 soup in the box isn’t as good as the Campbell’s soup in the box and which Lean Cuisine is the tastiest. I always feel so out of place when we talk about food (which is often), because I just have no frame of reference. I have nothing intelligent to say and no stories of “well the last time I roasted a ....”

I”ll also say that I’m not ashamed to admit that I like Stouffer’s Lasagna and I’m not opposed to having pasta sauce out of a jar, and my “I”ve had a bad day dinner is a frozen pizza and a bottle of cheap shiraz”. (Shout out to The Little Penguin wine). I assume this is heresy to some.

This leads me to where I found myself earlier today. I was in Kroger with a shopping list sent to me by e-mail by the boyfriend. I’m walking around a foreign Kroger (on Chinoe) and staring at my BlackBerry experiencing actual make-me-shake-a-little stress. The list said things like “asparagus OR broccoli”. How do I decide which? How much? How do I tell which looks better? What is a good price for either? Then, “1 Onion”. Did y’all know there are like 4 kinds of onion? Red, yellow, white, vidalia and then those all over again, but organic. I was then told to buy steak. I’ve never bought steak in my life. This was it’s own stress and involved a conversation with a guy behind a counter. This made the situation worse, because I had to announce my ignorance to another.

Nevertheless, dinner was purchased and it was tasty. It was also NOT prepared by me. I did my usual make sure everyone’s glass of wine was full and manned the DVR as we watched trash TV. This is what I’m good at. I can keep people happy and entertain, I just can’t possibly feed them without assistance, not even Shake and Bake.

2010, in Summary, before The Price is Right, Jan 11

Since New Year’s Day I’ve made exactly 5 attempts to blog. I’ve posted exactly nothing. So, I find myself sitting here on January 11 waiting for the The Price is Right to come on and having posted not a single thing in 2010. What follows is simply a giant condensing of what I had been trying to form into longer, more developed thoughts.

--I had never heard of the “whatever you do/eat on New Year’s day will be indicative of your entire year” belief until this year. It appears everyone in the world knew about this, but somehow had forgotten to tell me. However, if that’s the case, I’m going to spend 2010 recovering from food poisoning and eating bread and ginger ale. I’ll be having a gigantic fight with the boyfriend. I’ll also end up having delightful conversations with a friend who attempted to make me feel better and sent me home with all of the food I missed at the now legendary brunch I couldn’t attend. And in summary, I’ll probably never eat spinach salad again. That’s the January 1, 2010 summary.

--I love snow. It’s so pretty and makes me have some fairly sappy, nostalgic childhood memories. I’ve just developed an aversion to the stuff. You see, my job gets ridiculously busy when it snows. It makes me go from really hating the job to being almost unable to get out of bed and go. I was nearly 2 hours late everyday this week. It was all purely a function of barely being able to make myself get up and go. Thankfully, nobody at work really cares when I get there.

--I love the Winter Olympics (and not just the super gay figure skating) and can’t wait for them to start.

--Lastly, I first heard this “creative class” term back in June. I wrote a quick bit about it on our “Mowing the Bluegrass” site (which took a brief hiatus, but will be coming back soon). However, I will restate my initial point. We have a ton of young, creative, perfectly willing to do something people. We just are rarely engaged. We don’t need to recruit them, entice them or incentivize our city. We just need to look under our collective noses and realize we have a giant pool of untapped talent that we look over. I said it in my initial writing and I’ll say it again “we’re here and we have disposable income!”. Even more, we have some great ideas about how to take our Lexington forward and are willing to do the heavy lifting. We just have no idea how to bust through the “established voices” to be heard.

So that’s 2010 up to this point. Hopefully, this is also no indication of my using this little space in 2010. I kind of enjoy it.