My mother has been raving about a free cooking class they hold upstairs at the grocery store every Thursday called "What's For Dinner". The idea is that the chef prepares a recipe which is relatively easy and quick and you will be so gobsmacked with inspiration that you will hurl yourself downstairs to buy the ingredients immediately and do all your grocery shopping at Loblaws for all time because you are so indebted to them. Plus, you get to eat the results of the class, thereby resulting in the proverbial free lunch. (Which does exist, by the way.)
We had a very nice turkey and mixed bean chili, with corn chips, by the way, and it was a very nice way to spend an hour on a winter's afternoon.
Luckily, I like to cook. I say luckily, because I realize that for plenty of people, cooking is a boring, wearying chore that is endless and unsatisfying. As one young woman I work with remarked wistfully, "it must be nice to be able to just go into the kitchen and make stuff and just have it turn out". Actually, yes, it is. (Lest you think I am re-writing history, I have had plenty of stuff not turn out, and in the most repellent fashion possible.) So, from my mistakes I have learned the following about cooking:
Cooking is an art, but baking is a science. You can mess around with proportions and seasonings and substitutions all you like when you are making a stew or a soup or a pasta sauce, but when a cake recipe says "3/4 cup of packed brown sugar", they mean it. Not half a cup, not icing sugar and don't think you can get away with having it all loosey-goosey, either. Baking is a harsh mistress.
Complicated is not always better. There are plenty of chefs and cookbook authors who seem to think that everyone who is cooking has a fully stocked, professional kitchen with wine fridge and an 8-top gas stove, a fishmonger on speed-dial and a sous-chef to do all the prep work. This means that I frequently see recipes for something simple, like an apple crisp, that begins "On the first day, go out into your orchard.....". This recipe is more for the writer than for the cook. Give it a pass.
There is no substitution for butter. In an effort to cook a little healthier, I once bought some "low fat butter", (which is sort of like buying "low-carb bread") and when I went to melt it for sauteeing, I noticed that it.....didn't. Melt, I mean. It sort of got softer, and gooeyer, like a marshmallow, but it didn't resemble butter in the least. I decided that marshmallowy shrimp was an experience I would be better off not having, and bought real butter from thereon in. Don't even get me started on margarine.
Make sure you have everything before you start cooking. The French have a fancy name for this "mise-en-place", but really, it means,make sure you have everything before you start cooking. Wrestling with an 18 pound turkey whiich is the temperature of the surface of the sun is not the time to realize that you have no platter on which to put it. Or stuff to make gravy. Or anything to go with the turkey.
A good knife is really worth it. I've tried to cook in other people's kitchens where they don't have decent knives and it is torturous. A wonky, dull, flimsly knife is really hard to work with, and makes the job a million times less pleasant, not to mention unsafe, as you will be tempted to use it on your own wrists by the end of the prep.
The trickiest thing about cooking is getting all the food on the table at the same time. I once went to a dinner party where we ate the appetizers, and then the vegetables, and then the potatoes and a few more appetizers and then the dessert and a couple of hours later, the lamb. (It took a lot longer to roast than the cook thought.) It wasn't so bad, though, as the hostess served copious amounts of wine and everything was delicious, even if we did eat the entire meal in stages over an entire evening. Which brings me to my last rule:
It is not always going to go your way. Even an experienced cook can have a stringy roast or gummy rice or a black bean soup that looks like vomit. Chalk it up to experience and move on.
I can see that if you put a lot of effort into cooking and it turns out badly time and time again, it's discouraging. But every now and again, when it turns out really, really well? It's all worth it.
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