I just made an amazingly delicious sauce with six ingredients: tomatoes, onions, basil, red pepper, garlic, and oregano. I am having a pastagasm right now as I eat it served on angel hair pasta with a beer.
If I can do this, can I say that “I can cook”? Or not?
As far as I’m concerned, anything more complex than “open a can of something and heat it up” or “pop a frozen dinner/pizza in the microwave/oven” is considered cooking. My dinner tonight was borderline; I opened a package of Knorr’s Rice Sides Cheese and Broccoli and added a quarter-pound of cut-up precooked sausage to it.
If you can do that, you’ve probably got about 90% of all Hell’s Kitchen contestants beat.
With those ingredients in a pasta sauce, you can’t really go wrong.
That said, a very large part of cooking is knowing just what things you can’t go wrong with. And after all, it’s the results that matter, and it sounds like your results were pretty good.
Anyone who can read instructions and follow the steps can cook. The question really is: can you cook well? That requires consistency over time.
Well, if you did that simple recipe with caramelization and layering of flavors, making the sauce jump and reduce, consciously or not… then I think you can probably cook. If you dumped it in a pot, and stewed, well, even then, you cooked.
A cook, is a chef in training, who will do anything possible to either take over the kitchen after the chef leaves (or actively campaign and negotiate for his dismissal- the campaigneer’s takeover or outright coup,… or, a cook is the guy that kisses the chef’s ass and goes on to bigger and better things as his lackey in Scottsdale.
To me, the main qualification for saying “I can cook” is that you can make good stuff without following a recipe or using premade ingredients. And, yes, do it consistently.
I say I can’t cook because I have to either look up a recipe, or follow what my mom told me exactly. And even then I’m likely to screw up, like I did when i used salted butter for icing…
I wouldn’t say that one “can’t cook” if they use recipes. It’s not like plenty of people don’t produce utter crap from perfectly good recipes.
I’d say that if you can produce consistently good results using recipes, then you’re an adequate cook. When you start producing consistently good results from recipes you altered, then you can cook. When you start producing consistently good results without recipes, you’re a good cook.*
*All this pertaining to the skills of a home cook, not a restaurant cook with aspirations.
Not very relevant, but I wouldn’t call this a sign that you can’t cook. I love salted butter in icing!
I’d have to agree that following a recipe doesn’t make one a bad cook - though I’d say being able to improvise makes one a better cook. I still use recipes a lot, although as I’ve cooked more, I’ve started improvising a bit, as well as modifying or combining recipes to suit my tastes. So, I think I’m a better cook, but I’d still say me-five-years-ago could cook, even if I was more strictly following recipes then.