Cooking Faux Pas

There are three things that I am exceptionally bad at: conducting, cooking and drawing. I discovered that I could not draw in middle school art class as my peers began drawing portraits while I prided myself on my ability to draw symmetrical stick figures. Conducting was a daily struggle for me this past year as I attempted to keep up with instrumentalists used to reading scores with more than 8 parts while simultaneously transposing a good number for them. Luckily, drawing and conducting are not skills which are typically required on a daily basis, however, the ability to feed yourself is.

My inability to cook delicious (or even passable) meals is not due to a lack of effort, in fact I love to cook and the creative process associated with it, rather my lack of skill or patience. It often begins well – I search the internet for “simple healthy meal” or something similar and look through twenty or so photos until I find something that looks both feasible and tempting. I set out the pans, wash the vegetables and begin following the recipe to a T until I realize I am missing an ingredient. “No worries” I think “I’ll just substitute it with some other herb”. Two minutes later the same thing happens and yet again I substitute without knowing the true accuracy of my substitution. Fast forward to when the food is on my plate and I take the first bite – odds are it did not turn out well.

Perhaps if I was a bit more patient it would turn out better. If instead of cooking everything on high (obviously that is the most efficient way!) I considered lowering the temperature so that the pot did not overflow or if I could stop myself from opening the oven every five minutes to check if it was done, things would cook more evenly and come out less like hard bricks and more like chicken. Although I am acutely aware of my cooking faux pas there is some part of me that refuses to rectify them.

My own lack of success while attempted to cook has fueled my love of cooking TV shows. The chefs that you see on shows like Chopped and Masterchef (my two personal favorites) are true artists and I have been known to play episodes while I cook to help me pretend I am preparing a meal just as impressive. So often we look at food as a means to an end, we eat for nutrition and sustenance not for the beauty of preparation or complexity of flavors, and we forget that food can be about so much more than the number of calories per serving. We forget that the chefs who work behind the scenes are more artists than skilled laborers and that what we create in the kitchen can be, and should be, about more than the number of dirty dishes we leave behind.