On Cooking

We're gonna need a bigger bowl.

My roommates from last year will be the first people to tell you that I’m no good at cooking. They say this because over the course of last year I displayed very few culinary skills, opting instead to patronize Subway and my good friend Chef Boyardee. I also learned a lot about canned soup last year.*

*If you ever see a can of soup with some sort of meat in it, you’d do just as well not to buy it, because every kind of meat in every kind of canned soup will always taste like socks, and not necessarily clean ones, either.

I have to say, though, that while I may not have shown a lot of proficiency with knives or stoves or ovens or Dutch ovens,* I got really good at the microwave. If you want to make a quesadilla (in the microwave, naturally), first you’ve got to take your tortillas and put them in the microwave under a damp paper towel for 45 seconds on 70% power. They’ll come out of there tasting like you just got them from an authentic street vendor in Guadalajara (who bought them at Safeway and microwaved them, that is).

*Forgive me for being footnote heavy here, but thanks to the Internet I’ll never be able to respect the Dutch oven as a cooking tool.

My old roommates gave me a lot of grief because while they would spend half an hour cooking our frozen mini pizzas in the oven, I would spend three minutes microwaving them. Their argument was that oven cooking ensured bubbly cheese and crispy crust; mine was that no matter how you cook it it’s going to be a shitty frozen pizza, so you may as well do it fast so you don’t have time to get your hopes up.

It was by observing my old roommates that I finally learned how to make pasta. I’d never paid much attention to the (phenomenal) cooking that my mother did while I was growing up, preferring to merely enjoy the end result, and I guess I’d never noticed the steaming pot filled with slowly cooking pasta before. I think I’d assumed that pasta was delivered hot and fresh in the same way people used to deliver milk to your door. Or maybe I believed in some sort of omnipotent pasta fairy. My childhood memories are murky and highly perplexing.

Last year, though, I discovered that pasta was purchased dry or frozen and then cooked in a pot of water, after which a sauce is added – usually one that comes in a bottle that says “Safeway Select” on the side. Later on in the year I discovered that sauces could be created independent of Safeway’s influence. It was an exciting time.

A lot of what prevented me from cooking last year, aside from outright stupidity, was the fact that our quad-style apartment’s kitchen was set up as though someone had put a set of cabinets and an oven in the middle of a narrow hallway, either as a cruel joke or a means to ensure that nobody ever enjoyed using the kitchen, ever. This year, though, I’ve been blessed with a very spacious kitchen that affords ample room for both cooking and, more importantly, beer pong.

So I’ve decided to get into cooking (as opposed to beer pong*) – partially to stick it to my old roommates, partially to take advantage of whatever talent I’ve inherited from my mother, and partially because Mike is also an excellent cook, and once the two of us are able to get together and swap recipes we’ll have no trouble winning the Gayest Straight Guys 2009 title.

*I just really don’t like beer, and I have too much dignity to play and let somebody else drink the beer for me like some high school cheerleader at a frat party. It’s a Go Big or Go Home situation in which I opt to Go Home.

In these first few weeks I’ve been sticking largely to simple pasta sauces, just so I can get an idea of how cooking works and what happens when you put splattery things over a fire. The good news is that I’m getting the hang of it, sort of. The bad news is, for the first few weeks it was really kicking my ass.

Only in the last few days have we acquired a garlic press, and so up until then I was mincing the garlic on my own, which is a very time intensive process. Therefore when I was first experimenting with sautéing garlic in olive oil I was very cautious to avoid burning it, as I had learned during a failed cooking venture with The Ex Girlfriend last year that burned garlic is what Hell tastes like and was unwilling to risk ruining the food I’d spent so much time preparing. As a result, many of my early garlic and olive oil sauces were essentially olive oil with chunks of raw garlic floating in it.

Tortellini, I’ve found, is a double edged sword. One edge – the good edge – is the euphoria all humans experience when they’re eating something and they discover that it’s filled with cheese. The other edge is that that very cheese filling makes it tricky to cook. Maybe it’s just me – maybe I’m really bad at cooking tortellini – but every time I’ve tried so far it’s resulted panic and profanity.*

*When I get nervous in the kitchen my first response is to start talking to the food. Thus: “Alright, just gonna throw a little salt in the- Woah! Fuck! Slow down, tortellini, what did you do to the water? Why are you making it boil over like that? Fuck you! I’m just gonna turn this shit down a bit, and… Okay, tortellini, I turned the heat down, why are you still boiling over? You got to hold up your end of the deal, tortellini – I turn you down, you stop making the water boil over! Piss! Shit!”

Most recently, I tried to make a vodka sauce, wherein you make a standard tomato sauce and then add cream and vodka to it – basically, if I added Kahlua it’d be like dumping a White Russian into my marinara sauce. What I discovered when I tasted what I’d made was that the sauce was unsettlingly creamy and sweet for something that I’d put two full onions and God knows how much garlic into, forcing me to toss it with a fair amount of red wine vinegar to try and make it taste less like a dessert. Even now it doesn’t taste so great, and at the moment I can’t figure out if I fucked up or if I just don’t like vodka sauce.

What I find encouraging is that, unlike most of my many failures, this one has yet to produce any significant embarrassment or self-loathing. Up until I inadvertently poison myself, cooking could turn out to be a pretty worthwhile hobby.

Truman Capps has plenty of mediocre vodka sauce that he might not be using, if you’re interested.