The Joy Fear Of Cooking

I have a favorite website which is dedicated to two of my favorite things…cooking and photography. Its called TasteSpotting. You can click on the link in sidebar to see why I like this site. Its not your normal foodie site and you can tell by the quality of the recipes and the photography, that the people that submit really love to cook. It got me to thinking why some people don’t like cooking…aside from the obvious “laziness” factor or the fact that cooking for one is boring?

In my family the love of cooking has been handed down from both my parents and grandparents. Meals with the family were mostly a great occasion and remain that way even today. My mom never made cooking look like a chore and she seem to share that duty equally with my dad who had been a cook on a ship during World War II. You’d think cooking under those circumstances would make you swear off being in the kitchen forever. But no, he seemed to loved to cook for the family and friends that dropped by our home…the more the better. He even managed to invent dishes during lean times with cheaper cuts of meat and home-grown veggies.

My mom on the other hand, is a artist in the kitchen and made it look easy. If you ever came to her New Year celebration you’d understand why. She picked up her skills from her mother…my grandmother. I spent one glorious summer with, running around her country home, barefoot and dirty. I watched my grandmother kill her chickens fresh, pick her own vegetables and send me out to pick berries growing along the back roads of North Carolina. She made biscuits and pies with no visible recipes that I could see. All of them encouraged any talents we had in the kitchen. I even remember developing a recipe for the Betty Crocker BakeOff when I was 12! Cherry donuts. I’m not sure whether they were good or not…but I was encouraged by the dream of them tasting good and in the process winning the $10,000 prize.

So why do so many people hate cooking? I understand that a lot of people never had a family mentor who passed along the joys of cooking without making it look like a chore. After talking to different people (even people that I have taught to cook) I think the answer is simple…fear! Make no mistake, cooking can be work. But the theraputic value far outweighs the work factor in my opinion. More importantly, the fear of failure could be a debilitating factor. If someone doesn’t like something that you’ve cooked, most people treat it as a huge failure and refuse to try again. Instead, tryusing the failure as a teaching tool.

I love to try new things in the kitchen, to innovate. Its not always successful but I keep trying. A few weeks ago I tried an idea I had involving the use of wanton wrappers and a filling. Sort of a shortcut to making a ravioli. So I made a chicken and sausage filling and used pre-made wonton wrappers in place of the homemade pasta I usually make. Everything was fine until I placed them into boiling water, where they promptly fell apart and turned mushy. And with the pasta sauce I made they quickly because a disaster. Wanton wrappers are way too thin. I mentioned to Hannamari that they hadn’t come out like I had wanted. But the real test came when our good friend Yee came over. My friend will eat almost anything and in huge amounts for her 90lb frame. But she took one bite and honestly said what I already knew, “I can’t eat these!” This from a women that had never turned down a meal. I laughed and we all headed out to eat. My feelings were not hurt and I learned a good lesson about wanton wrapper. In fact I found a whole new use for them based on my failure. I’ll give you that recipe in another post.

The point here is that I was not afraid to fail. Everyone fails but it can become not only a good motivator but a nice memory…like my friends honesty about my faux-ravioli. Or the fact that some years ago my mom made me my favorite cake as birthday present…pineapple upside down cake. Only she used “baking soda” instead of baking powder. What can you do? I ate the cake and to this day we both have a great laugh when we think about it. On of my greatest family memories is my oldest sisters first try at making biscuits…a total failure…which precipitated the one and only food fight we ever had during a family dinner. And it was started by my Dad who threw one of the aforementioned biscuits against the dining room wall and proclaimed that those biscuit could be used as weapons! It was totally fun and my sister learned from it, because her second batch were totally sublime. To this day she remains one of my favorite cooks and I look forward to the time we can share the kitchen.

So the the next time you are afraid of cooking, try to make a few memories and discover the joy of cooking. Find someone that you like and have them join you or you join them in making a meal. Everyone loves to eat. but cooking is more fun and the memories are better.