Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook

When my dinner arrived at the table it looked less like food and more like evidence in an arson investigation.

“I can’t eat this,” I said. “The pork chop is completely burned.”

“Not all of it,” my wife said. “Just cut away the burned part and eat what’s left.”

“What’s left is the bone.”

“Then eat the green beans.”

“Burned.”

“The applesauce, then.”

“Burned.”

“The salad.”

“Burned.”

If it actually had been evidence in an arson investigation, the report would probably have read:

Although the exact nature of the accelerant used hasn’t been conclusively determined by laboratory testing, early results point to barbeque sauce; most likely a cheap house brand. What is clear to this investigator is that the perpetrator is obviously vicious, with deeply anti-food tendencies.

“I want send this back,” I said.

“You can’t,” my wife sighed. “You cooked it.”

Sadly, she was right. My cooking skills are easily a match for Simon Cowell’s gifts at diplomacy or Keith Richard’s highly-developed fashion sense. If we had been forced to rely on my cooking, we’d have starved to death years ago.

This is not to say that all guys are lousy cooks. My brother-in-law Bernie is the MacGyver of chefs. Give him a jar of pimentos, an ostrich egg, and a quarter-teaspoon of flour and he’ll whip up a memorable three-course meal including an appetizer, your choice two entrees, and a dessert. In his hands, food tastes good because it wants to. In my hands, it burns because it is ashamed.

If I had to put my finger on the root cause of my cooking problems, I’d have to say that it’s because I never actually learned to cook. When I was in college, I subsisted by focusing my attention on two main food groups; box-shaped foods and can-shaped foods. Things that met my criteria included cereal, microwave meals, and foods that ended in “roni.” Can-shaped foods included soups, fruit, and gourmet pasta meals that ended in “oli.” I was also partial to anything which featured the words “instant”, “simple”, “fast”, or “quick” on the label. The ideal meal would have been called “Fast and Simple Instant Quick Food.” Even if it had been some form of doggie dinner, I’d have eaten it just for the name.

Later I expanded my diet to include the group of “things wrapped in plastic” which included pre-made deli sandwiches, burritos, and tortilla chips. Fortunately, before I moved on to the group called “foods purchased at the odd lot store because they were cheap”, I married an awesome cook. While we were dating, I took precautions to hide my own culinary deficiencies lest she find a more attractive mate. As a result, she tragically asked me to cook for her after we were married.

Specifically, she asked me to grill some chicken wings. I think she suffered from the illusion that grilling is an instinct for guys and that I couldn’t possibly mess up. She was wrong.

While I grilled the wings on a tiny Hibachi by our back steps, I passed the time reading a particularly absorbing book. In fact, I did more reading than actual cooking and when I looked up again the wings were so charred they appeared to have been retrieved from the bottom of a fire pit at a campsite.

My wife — and this is part of the reason I love her — thanked me and actually ate a couple. More incredibly, she took the leftovers to work the next day. As she gnawed her way through the cinders, a steady parade of her co-workers passed through the break room. Finally she asked what they were all doing. One of them sheepishly admitted that they had a pool going about what her meal had been before it was burned.

Really.

I could probably learn to cook if I could learn to decode recipes. Part of the problem is that I went to school during the brief period when the United States flirted with the metric system. Oh sure, the reliable imperial system with its halves and quarters and eighths had stood beside us for decades, but we wanted a fun new system; a system based on the shapely number ten and all of the interesting ways it could be manipulated. For a while, cars had both systems on their speedometers — kilometers per hour and hectares per equinox. Even some road signs toyed with both systems, but the fling didn’t last long and by the eighties we had gone back to the imperial system with its sensible shoes and its reliance on fractions to get the job done.

My teachers always encouraged me to ignore the imperial system in favor of the metric system and, as a result, both systems are incomprehensible to me. As a practical matter, this means I’m incapable of dividing a recipe when I need to make smaller portions. If the recipe feeds eight and calls for a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract, I can’t figure out whether to put in four quarts or two centiliters if I’m making the dish for three people.

Decoding the recipes isn’t purely a mathematical problem, though. There’s also the linguistic component. Suppose I want to make a simple, traditional, French favorite such as boeuf bourguignon avec moi enchante fleur de lis ennui. Once I have the ingredients assembled, I’m called upon to do things like “reduce the sauce”, “fold the batter”, “julienne the fries” or “toad the wet sprocket.” I suspect this is actually a massive joke (sort of like the classic snipe hunt) in which experienced chefs compete to see who can taunt a new cook the longest.

Fortunately, as I mentioned, I married a wonderful cook who is content to prepare most of our meals…or maybe she just does it in self-defense.