kitchen stories

in the last couple years, i've gotten very lazy about feeding myself. especially near the end of my graduate career, there were several weeks that i only set foot in my kitchen to boil water for my morning tea, and the rest of my daily sustenance was acquired elsewhere. on the upside, this was affordable thanks to the scores of cheap restaurants all over Berkeley (plus it almost eliminated dish washing). on the downside, all that restaurant food probably took years off my life. the internships i did at Google didn't help either. coming out of a six-month stint of eating three free, healthy meals a day in their gourmet cafes, i was overwhelmed by supermarkets, and attempts to cook for myself typically ended with a hasty run for Thai take-out. (i've heard more than one fellow employee joke that the free food makes us docile so we can't fend for ourselves any longer, thus reducing employee turnover. i doubt that's the primary reason they feed their employees, but it is an undeniable side-effect for some of us.) my fridge was a barren wasteland, often holding only old beer and salad dressing, and there were several nights that i waited too long and was too tired for dinner, so i just put off this eating thing for tomorrow's Future Me to figure out.

in my final weeks of freedom before i begin my full-time job (and forget again what to do with raw vegetables), i've been spending extra time stocking my fridge with yummy things and cooking for myself. it's relaxing and i've even had some minor successes, mostly thanks to Eating Well magazine, which my sister got for me a couple of years ago (she and i share a deep passion for using sticky tabs, which protrude from my magazines in every direction). in the last couple months, i tried whole grain pasta with creamy mushroom-pea sauce and turkey tenderloin with whiskey-cherry sauce. some of the successes in the last week include dairy-free brown rice banana pudding and squash saute with gorgonzola polenta, and just tonight i made both the frozen raspberry meringue pie and raspberry-almond crumb tart (both were yummy, but while the tart was a cinch, the frozen pie was a royal pain in the ass). tomorrow's project is the basque vegatable rice, and maybe after that a salmon dish and some squash risotto...

there have been disasters, though. if you've come over to my place for waffles on a Sunday morning, you may think of me as a confident and proficient cook, but you are watching me make the same easy recipe for the 38th time. get me on a recipe that i haven't made three dozen times, and i have the memory of a goldfish. i often burn things as i run back to read the instructions a fifth time, then pick up two steps past where i should be. the day i attempted broccoli and corn calzones was a hoot. it began with me reaching into the cabinet above the sink for my bag of flour which i then dumped directly over top my head. it was a real I Love Lucy-esque moment, but once the hilarity faded, it was a bitch to clean up (everywhere the flour contacted water it turned into a persistent paste) then i had to run out for more flour. that same experiment was also my first encounter with Trader Joe's whole wheat pizza dough. all i had to do was roll it out into a six-inch diameter circle. sounds easy, right? it was an epic battle, and while i won in the end, it wasn't pretty. the result looked more like a squirrel skin pinned down to a dissection tray, after being used for target practice. i managed to cook up a couple calzone only to reaffirm that i don't like eating that much dough, so i picked out the filling.

but the process of improvement is its own reward, especially when cooking. i'm trying to sign up for a cooking lesson at Kitchen On Fire in my neighborhood (the first class is on knives and cutting techniques, which is great because (1) it's crucial for faster prep, and (2) afterward i can earnestly use my "i can't, i need to stay home and sharpen my knives" date excuse), and i will continue to share (foist) my food (experiments) with (onto) friends. i don't expect that i'll ever come anywhere close to my sister's amazing culinary skills, but i'm having a ball anyway.

(as a side note, i borrowed the title from a quirky, lovable, understated Swedish film i watched last week. i continue to make only glacial progress through my Netflix queue, even when on vacation.)