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Post date: Jan 10, 2020 5:7:49 PM
over dinner i told my romantic associate [1] exactly what i thought of the soup/stew on the table ...
that using canned black beans was a bad idea, because most of them simply disintegrated into glop, and that kidney beans would have retained their shape better ..
that sauteing the zucchini was a bad idea, because they just disintegrated under the same high-heat braise, and that it was better to just add them raw when adding the broth ..
that adding palestinian couscous [2] was a bad idea, because its texture became tapioca-like under the stew-y cooking conditions, not unlike boba (but thankfully without that sweetness) ..
.. at which point my romantic associate got tired of the negative criticism.
she just told me that she liked it how it was and that i shouldn't nitpick over all of my missteps when making it [3]. you see, i was envisioning making this ..
image courtesy of taste at home magazine, so please don't sue;
on a related note, the recipe in the link is simple and i recommend it.
.. whereas it came out as something that i will not photograph, being much more grayish and un-brothy and un-shiny. honestly, i meant to make soup but it came out stew.
come to think of it, now looking at the photo above, there's another mistake: i forgot to add kale at the end, too?
argh: it never ends.
...
later i went and had a second bowlful, for obvious reasons:
i was still hungry, and it wasn't awful.
yes, it's not pretty. it's nowhere near the best dish i've made, and i wish it didn't count as something i've cooked. then again, it's nowhere near the worst foods i've made either.
i may have high standards for myself, but the point of cooking is ultimately to feed people that you want to feed, including yourself.
the thing is .. well, one of many things is .. that regular cooks never tell you about: cooking is hard, even when you've been doing it regularly for a while.
starting out, when your skills aren't great, then you make a lot of crap. the worst part about such an outcome is that you have to eat this crap or you have to throw it out .. whereas the whole point of cooking (for me, anyway) is to feed yourself well and! save money.
either way, it sucks.
the thing is: there will be bad days and you will still make crap on occasion. there are good reasons:
maybe the broccoli wasn't as fresh as you expected;
maybe there's less chicken than you thought and it's too late to defrost more or to go to the store to get another package;
maybe you thought that you could just cook on higher heat to save cooking time, but no: you weren't paying attention like a fvcking idiot and it's just a dry, dark mess of a stir fry now.
that said, it's the same rationale as for any investment or a long-term relationship: just because it doesn't always go well doesn't mean that it's not worth doing.
if you want improvement, then you have to work at it, even if it's something that you think you know how to do. cooking isn't armchair thinking: it's about the quality of one's practised abilities to execute a certain outcome that involves nutrition and, often enough, aesthetics.
put another way, there's no point in just thinking about a dish. either make it, buy it, or leave it alone.
...
re-reading the phrases above, there is a good side to all of this. you see, there's no greater feeling than once, just once, having something taste as great as you wanted it to taste. it's addictive. it makes you want to become good and predictable at it, to be able to make a reasonable version of that benchmark with little/no effort.
it's the reward of having become proficient at something that rewards you.
when people ask me if i'm a good cook or not, i usually just say that i can eat what i cook. i guess it's all anyone can really say.
...
ok, for the record (and just to make myself feel better) here are some photos of dishes that i've cooked in the last year and a half. in fact, the middle one looks like the soup i was trying to make, tonight ..
so, there! i feel much better now.
...
[1] since she doesn't like the term "girlfriend" due to its diminutive connotations, i avoid the word too. also, "partner" isn't necessarily off-limits for heterosexual people, but it doesn't sound right either. so as a compromise, we made up the term "romantic associate."
[2] yes, everyone else calls it "israeli couscous" but i'm sure that this ingredient predates the post-WWII nation of israel (or as i like to think of it now: magneto-land). also, as soon as they stop their terrorist agenda towards Palestinians, then i'll stop calling it palestinian couscous.
[3] out of curiosity, were any of you under the impression that my romantic associate was doing the cooking and not me? (just curious.)
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