On the whole, I observe that “good” cooks enjoy cooking, & “bad” cooks do not. I think that makes a big difference.
Yes, but not always. A friend of mine absolutely loves cooking. He is always inviting people to dinner. But he is one of the worst cooks I know. (The worst one is my mom, but that is another story). My over-enthusiastic friend tosses ingredients together based on how well they sound together. He can sit there, mentally listing adding ingredients, getting more dreamy and enthusiastic with ever more ingredients thrown in.
That is another thing. He suffers from the delusion that if a dish tastes good now, it will even better if he adds cream. And pine nuts. And liquor. And three different garnishes. And pesto. And whatever is the fashionable ingredient du jour.
It doesn’t help that he is the heaviest smoker I know. I sometimes wonder if he has any smell receptors left.
I have both of those cookbooks! I mostly use Joy, but I like Bittman’s sections on how to cook individual foods, such as vegetables (carrots, zucchini, etc.)
I also have good genes – both my mom and dad home-cooked very well all the way through my childhood.
I’m a decent cook for a bachelor; what I cook is always edible and often delicious, if I do say so myself, but I’m always slightly surprised if it comes out perfect. My main problem is that things never thicken when they’re supposed to, which drives me bananas (“Yes, this was supposed to be custard. Now it’s custard sauce, okay?”), and I can’t seem to get the timing for buying vegetables right and always seem to buy them right before I become insanely busy, leaving me with half a head of lettuce and some broccoli withering away in the refrigerator.
Incidentally, I’m still bitter that I had to sit through roughly 500 hours of high school and cégep calculus for which I have no use and which I do not remember in the slightest (I could possibly recognize an integral sign if shown one, but I have no more clue what it does than I know how to build the Parthenon), and yet we didn’t have one half-second of instruction in how to cook or do any other domestic task, which I will have to do every single day for the rest of my life.
My terrifying propane oven in Cameroon had no thermometer whatsoever. You just looked at how high the fire seemed and guessed.
Eventually I got an oven thermometer and found the temperature swung wildly constantly. it’d be at 450 one minute and 300 the next.
In the end I got rid of the thermometer. I was churning out wonderful bread, cookies, casseroles, roasts, etc. with nothing but instinct, and second-guessing my instinct with facts just led to messed up food.
:smack: Doh!
So that button next to the “Submit Reply” button, does that do anything? It’s just for decoration, right?
And he lived to have children? :eek:
Apparently the key to food safety (if one can call it that) in such a situation is the “all day and all night” thing. They were able to keep it hot enough to stay out of the Danger Zone (ie, more than 140 F - which is lower than a simmer) at all times when it was just sitting there. If they had turned it off at night or when not eating and let it cool only to reheat it again later, then yeah, he might have gotten a Darwin Award instead of me! :eek:
My girlfriend claims she’s an awful cook. I don’t know, as she hasn’t cooked anything more than rice or baked potatoes in the microwave since we started living together. (I suppose it could just be a clever ruse.) Anyway, I’m not bad, but there are times I attempt recipes that are either over my head or just plain too much work. That said, my bible is The New Best Recipe (made by the guys from Cook’s Illustrated.) The recipes work and tend to be not too difficult. (If anyone wants to get me a birthday present you can get me a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated.) I got a free year of Bon Apetit somehow (my girlfriend still teases me about it at times) and I’ve yet to actually try a recipe out of the thing because they all call for like $50 worth of ingredients and skills I just don’t have yet. For instance, I love lamb burgers. Here’s the ingredients list from the latest grilling issue:
1 cup yogurt
3 Tbs fresh mint
2 Tbs fresh cilantro
1.25 ts lime peel
Coarse Kosher salt
4 Tbs olive oil
1.25 cups chopped onion
2 Tbs ginger
2 tsp coarse kosher salt
2 tsp Madras curry powder
1.75 pounds ground lamb
3 Tbs cilantro
1.5 tsp black pepper
3 med. zucchini
6 green onions
1 poblano chile
6 naans or pita breads
1 large tomato
Sounds yummy, doesn’t it? Except I’d have to drive all over town to find ground lamb (there’s a place, maybe, but I’m not sure), I’m enough of a purist to insist on naan, and I’m not sure I could find a poblano in the land of Anaheims. And that’s quite possibly the easiest burger recipe in the magazine. (Okay, that’s not true, but do I really want to spend that much time making a chipotle ketchup cheeseburger when I can just go to Jack in the Box?)
I agree that cooking is chemistry. However, I’ve never had to cook a roast under an inert atmosphere (lack of oxygen would probably screw up recipes anyway) or hook a condenser up to my pot of spaghetti. I’m still working on my timing some as well. In lots of ways synthetic organic is easier than cooking.
I used to be a terrible cook. My meat would be burnt on the outside and raw on the inside, my vegetables would be hacked into uneven pieces and either rubbery or squishy, everything was either too salty or too bland, etc. It wasn’t until I started living on my own that I was able to improve. Fortunately my mom was a good cook, so I wasn’t completely without background - I’d just never had to really apply myself before, I suppose. I started out by following recipes religiously, but after a while I gained enough confidence to start experimenting, and now I think my food is pretty respectable.
Timing is definitely the key thing that vastly improved the quality of my cooking. It’s such a fine line between perfect and overcooked sometimes.
Cook’s Illustrated is wonderful. My wife re-ups me for it every year as a birthday present.
RR
My Mother In Law (RIP and I miss her horribly) came from the Stereotypical English school:
- Overcooked veggies, nothing crisp allowed.
- Meat cooked until it was DONE. Nothing rare allowed in beef, and all poultry and pork had to be dry to be sure that it was “safe.”
- Minimal to zero salt, emphasized in my face because of her friends with hypertension, etc.
- No heat - she did not have the palate for spicy foods.
She cooked that way from her childhood. Her husband grew up with the same (his mother was not much of a cook either), so there was no pressure to adjust. It was not until I came on the scene that the food at family events started changing a bit (which led to more than one confrontation at holidays when she accused me of trying to throw her out of her own kitchen).
Damn I miss her.
My Mother can do great work in following recipes, except when she serves stuff from another era:
- Velveeta is the primary cheese. Block mild cheddar is getting fancy. I am the snooty son for my love of artisan cheeses.
- The various recipes that start with a can of some soup product. Again, I once loved these heavy, creamy, salty mixtures. Now that I know what they are trying to replace (flavorful cream based french cooking), I prefer the real thing.
I am reminded of a comparison of the recipes from The Tulsa World and the San Francisco Chronicle. It was the early 90s and friends of ours had both after a visit home to Tulsa (we all lived in the Bay area at the time). The Tulsa recipe started with, “Get a box of white cake mix.” The SF Chronicle recipe started with, “Go to the farmer’s market for fresh berries.”
Ooh, spicy chocolate shrimp! Sounds interesting. Is it like a Basque-inspired shrimp mole?
Could you send me the recipe? I’d like to try it, myself.
One time many years ago, due to unimportant circumstances I had Thanksgiving dinner with my brother-in-law’s family (sister’s husband) instead of my own. My mom, and my mom’s mom before her, in the past would made a delicious gravy from the turkey. It’s not that difficult-- take pan juices from the cooked turkey, add some chicken stock, and mix with a roux or flour slurry till it thickens.
My brother-in-law’s (former- they’re divorced now) family, on the other hand, served gravy made from a powder you mix with water. It was a nasty paste, flavorless other than being salty, with an unnaturally bright yellow color. They couldn’t even get like the premade Heinz gravy out of a jar, which is far inferior to real homemade gravy but woud’ve been more tolerable than this powdered “gravy” paste.
Cervaise has not been active for a while, only once since 2009.
Alright, since this thread is active again, I’ll add my anecdote. My mom wasn’t a “bad” cook per se, in the sense that you wouldn’t get food poisoning from her cooking or anything like that, but most of her meals were fairly bland. I’d describe her cooking style as “Midwestern meat and potatoes”. Most of her meals consisted of a hunk of meat seasoned with at most salt and pepper, cooked in this electric broiler thing she had, until it was DONE, like what Algher said 12 years ago. I think she was a little overly concerned with food safety, so she cooked everything until it was dried out to make sure it was “safe”. Side dishes consisted of reheated canned or frozen vegetables, and a starch like potatoes or plain rice.
I’ve never had any luck making gravy. I’ve tried, and tried, and tried, and it just doesn’t work for me. So, I stick to alternatives (but not fat-free gravy! Blecchh!!)
There’s a poster on another board who’s always talking about how the phrase “Grandma’s home cooking” would be a mortal insult, if they were comparing something to her grandmothers’ cooking (yes, both of them), because they too would way overcook everything, especially vegetables. I get boiling home-canned vegetables for 20 minutes to destroy botulism, but that’s not what they made.
My wife has a real talent for taking great recipes … and then “improving” them to make them “healthier”. Sigh.
I have an interesting case. My mom is an excellent cook by any proper standards…has a good sense of timing, flavor and presentation. Has many years of experience, and can cook anything. She has shelves of cookbooks.
Her tastes run toward the adventurous, and as an eater, I have always been the opposite. I’m frequently turned off by the “too fancy” stuff she’s cooking, although most other adults think it is heaven on earth. She’s frequently asked to cook for dinner parties, big groups, etc. Always the star at Christmas and Thanksgiving, Easter and other such “dinner” holidays.
Does she ever change her output to favor my tastes? No, never. It’s always what she wants, and I like it only about half the time (since I’m basically a child when it comes to food. Probably long term sensory issues. In my kid, we call it SPD / autistic spectrum, but I’ve got no such shields / labels to “excuse” my tastes.)
While I’d never call my mom a “bad” cook, I was often jealous of other mamas who would cook stuff their kids liked. Such as homemade pizza, etc. My mom never makes pizza.
Do you / did you have the option to make your own? Or wouldn’t she let anybody else in the kitchen?
Yeah, she’s sensitive about it. I could make something myself but that’s a battle best not fought. 