Intro Part III

I never learned how to cook. Not really, anyway. It seems surprising considering my mother is probably one of the best cooks on the planet. She owned her own chocolate shop with my father for over a decade, and I was raised in the back of it until I was four or five. Yet, she has the issue of not allowing things to be done incorrectly, thus my entire childhood if we wanted to help, we would start something and she would subsequently take over. Nothing chopped, stirred, or blanched well enough because she could always do it better. This leads one to believe they have a certain amount of deficiencies in the kitchen area. Even if we wanted to make something for ourselves it was impossible because the kitchen was not kept in any kind of intuitive order. If you wanted to find the lemon extract or a strainer you would search in every cabinet for at least 10 minutes only to get pots and overstuffed cans dropped on your toes before giving up and asking Mom in the end anyway. She would then ask what you were making, then proceed to tell you how you didn't really need to the lemon extract, you really wanted almond and it was in the corner shelf behind the bread or possibly next to the milk in the fridge for some odd known reason. Then it would become a treasure hunt with Mom and eventually she would be using a completely different set of ingredients (usually of the things that we found along the way that "would work") and ultimately she would be making an alteration of whatever recipe you began with. Grilled cheese would turn into grilled provolone with tomatoes and mustard seed. Plain brownies would become chocolate chip ganache cake. So eventually, my brother and I took the hint and got out of the kitchen, however we became wonderful table setters and can clean any dish no matter the grime!

Then I moved away to college and kept within my small realm of George Foreman grill and crock pot cooking. I didn't eat meat so there was no need to learn, and salad is pretty self-explanatory. Then I had an earth-shattering, soul-searching breakdown and moved to Ireland. I just so happened to end up in a house of 5 lovely housemates with the following background: a culinary student, a botinist with access to thousands of herbs and flowers, a worldwide traveler who lived on her own organic farm, and a Frenchie. Over the next few months I learned how to do the simplest dishes like pancakes and chicken to more complex and exotic cooking like Indian spiced curry, Jamaican cook, and finally, meat. It was a lovely time to be able to screw up, mix stuff together and learn with friends, so I came home finding more fun and life in the kitchen.

Now, I usually have the confidence to stick to my guns when cooking in my mother's kitchen. Since I still live at home its sometimes a struggle, but I find it fun to share recipes and make stuff up as you go along. I have learned that nearly everything can be salvaged (at the very least with some ketchup or hot sauce), and there's no ingredient that goes unused in a kitchen. One day I hope to have my own kitchen to work in, but for now, cooking with the girls is going to be the best!