Recently, camping twenty minutes from home with some old friends and some new, E requested me to tell two family stories at the propane campfire (statewide fire ban in state parks being normal in the late season.) I will retell them now, as they are from twenty or more years ago. But I will preface them with some explanatory wanderings....
When my dad cooks, he takes the engineering approach, which makes sense as he trained as an engineer. This means he follows ingredient lists, quantities, orders of procedures, numbers of mixing bowls, temperatures, and timings to the letter. And he usually finds great success.
My mother cooks, usually to survive, and also with an eye toward aesthetics, not just visual, but also in texture, flavor, presentation and historicity, depending on the purpose of the cooking at that moment. This means she takes recipes at face value, but will also alter them for practical reasons or for reasons of artistry. Due to the survival instinct and morals againat waste, less than perfect creations will be devoured by her, but not necessarily shared with others.
When I was growing up, food preparation was, most of the time, really a matter of survival, due to the overwhelm of so many people with so many needs and wants going in so many different directions. This meant that simplest was best, and including as many pre-prepared items as dictums of health and budget would allow was essential. My mom did most of the food preparation, with my father's volume of cooking coming in a distant second.
Mine was an even more distant third, like the distance from Mars to Pluto. This may have been a good thing, as my approach to cooking was to imagine something, often with the fantastical vision of one viewing another century through a magical opening in the clouds, and then to start throwing things together in an ethereal haze of time travel. The results were often inedible, or non-ideal from a flavor, texture, or volume perspective. The same could be said of the rare times I tried to follow a recipe. The recipe was taken as a suggestion, with alterations made seemingly willy-nilly.
Jared's family, however took a very different approach. More members of his family took an interest in cooking, and it seemed that they all managed to follow recipes, at least to the level where they turned out edible. They also seemed to have a habit of starting earlier in the process on average than my family, for example by regularly using raw ingredients such as dried beans.
When Jared and I first met, we eventually got to visiting on the weekends for a meal at each other's apartments. We relied on some basics like pasta with tomato sauce. Jared, knowing I was from Texas and that I liked salsa, decided to add a little culinary heat to the tomato sauce. Noticing he did so, and not being a confident cook myself, I followed suit, assuming he liked heat, and/or this was the correct way to make pasta sauce. And little by little, more red pepper flakes and jalapeño got added to each of our dishes over time in service of the other's supposed tastes and expectations; eventually neither of us was very... comfortable... eating a meal. We sat politely, nibbling at the firey hot stuff, suffering with smiles as we each imagined the other was enjoying our creation, steam pouring out of our ears, tongues hurting, and stomachs churning.
I don't remember how we eventually broke the cycle, but somehow our cooking did become more edible and sane again.
The cooking of dried beans was an art with which I had no previous experience, and in the learning process mistakes were made. One of those mistakes was to try seasoning black beans with dill, an herb I knew in the form of store-bought jarred dill pickles, but not with regards to its other applications. It turns out that for some reason, the flavor of dill when combined with the flavor of black beans creates a horrifying amalgamation, and I was able to swallow only the merest quantity of the finished product. Not wanting to waste the food or the effort, I somehow got the idea to go pioneer woman, and incorporate this terrible concoction into a loaf of bread. Which I set about mixing. I did, in fact, complete the process and bake it. Some people make banana bread or zucchini bread or cranberry walnut loaf. I presented the world, briefly, with Skunk Bread. No other name could suffice, as the flavor really did remind me of trying to eat the smell of skunk. I bravely soldiered on with my intention of not wasting, choking down a slice here and there. It is possible Jared ate a slice at some point, too. But after sitting on the counter for far too long, with its inherent putrescence and inedible texture, it went on the next leg of its journey to the dumpster behind my fire escape. It has been well over twenty years, but I would not be surprised if it were still sitting, intact, deep in the Cleveland landfill, telling other deathless garbage the sad story of its untimely creation by a heartless Frankenstein of the kitchen.
Those were the two stories I was asked to relay by the campfire. But I have thought of two more...
One year in particular, my roommate and I were excited to invite various dorm-bound friends to our old wood-floored century apartment for Easter lunch, just like real adults. Neither of us was famous for planning our time very far in advance, so we started the massive cooking project rather late on Saturday night. In the end, everything turned out fine, but there were two specific hiccups during the cooking phase. One was that neither of us had baked an angel food cake before, and we tried, using a boxed mix. I am not sure our pan was the size called for on the box. We baked it on the middle rack as called for, but it rose spectacularly up through the upper rack, and there we were at 1:00 in the morning in our small kitchen, beating the thing back through the hot bars into its own zone with spoons. It was a bit misshapen when done, but it may have been semi-edible. We also dumped an entire casserole dish of not-yet-cooked scalloped potatoes onto the floor instead of putting the glass pan into the fridge, also in the wee hours, and we salvaged it by rinsing the mess and adding more sauce. It was baked very early in the morning before our church appearance, and no one was any the wiser.
Another year after I really was an official adult, still living in the same apartment, but staying with the last set of rotating roommates before I myself up and married and moved to Rochester, I invited a few dorm-bound strapping young freshman for Easter lunch. I was their de facto music theory teacher five days a week, as their official professor was in and out on medical leave, and I was assisting quite heavily at times. To them it must have seemed like a great invite, but they didn't know about my cooking...
Somehow, when I went out shopping beforehand, my menu was poorly planned and prone to inspiration. At TOPS, there were some interesting root vegetables from South America for a great price, so I bought a pile. I had never eaten or cooked them, but how different could it be from potatoes, of similar origin? Roughly chopped and thrown into a large glass casserole in the oven with a little salt and pepper, I tossed it into the oven for an experimental and indeterminate amount of time. It was checked on at various points, and what data I was looking for on these checks may have been unclear. In the end, it was blacker and crunchier that might have been desired. This dish of over-cooked not-potato-chips was the star of the show, and was accompanied by two or three other items which I can't remember, but I hope in retrospect were distinctly less awful. They may not have been... Those three young men may have forgotten about their sad introduction to adult living by now, but I shudder to think that they are sitting around campfires even now telling their friends of the awful cooking they experienced at my hands the first Easter of their college careers.
