Thursday, May 14, 2009

The state of my culinary ability, in broad strokes–dismal and dreary, nuked at medium-high for 5 minutes, then allowed to cool indefinitely. When I rolled into the office yesterday after a long weekend, well after lunch time, I found myself without food and, more importantly, standing at a crossroads: venture out to collect some grub, as is customary for normal people, or unearth a PBJ sandwich I had forgotten in my desk the Thursday prior. Which path did I choose? Let’s just say my standards may have been compromised.

Technically the sandwich was nonperishable, but since I hadn’t closed the plastic properly, evaporation took hold and left what could be best described as desiccated. We’re talking the kind of shit you’d find in, like, an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, clutched in the hand of a mummy. Down the hatch it went, of course, followed closely by no small amount of shame. This sandwich wasn’t an isolated incident, understand, so much as a capstone to a recent rash of reprehensible dining decisions. I’ve been eating cold cereal regularly, to wit. For dinner.

What’s maddening is I can see the trajectory to becoming a capable cook. I can follow a recipe, you know? And if I got a few under my cap, learned to negotiate all the common pitfalls in the kitchen, I’d arrive at the good part: the ability to improvise on known recipes, improve upon them, invent something new. Create, in a word. Currently I do nothing of the sort. I assemble occasionally, cobbling together a sandwich or combining pasta with jarred sauce. This isn’t cooking, in my mind.

More often than not I activate food, whether by microwave or oven, and this also doesn’t qualify as cooking. I no longer believe I’ll find my answers in formal instruction. At $65 a pop, I start to wonder how much more enjoyment I’d get out of ten burritos–cooked before my very eyes by others–or why I wouldn’t just spend that same money on groceries. Much as with golf, I’d rather do it myself than take a class. That’s the plan. Turn to the Internet for recipes, then prepare them, one after the other, until I’m able to look at the local turkey vulture in the eye and say, “Perhaps we are different, you and I.” I’ll start with a recipe for PBJ.