Where To Now?

I am often envious of anyone who grew up in a home where good food was important, particularly if they were actually involved in the cooking. When I started out in my pursuit of producing good food I had so little experience with cooking growing up it was hard for me to even follow a recipe correctly.

Unfortunately most recipes are written for people that already know how to cook.
-- A. Brown

It is amazing how often recipes are filled with cooking terms and procedures that are non-obvious to the clueless cook.

Here are some of my favorites I struggled with. These generally fall in to one of three categories.

1. Not really knowing what it means.

• Sweat
• Shock
• Saute
• Sear
• Braise
• Roast
• Blanch

2. Subjective and qualitative decisions.

• Pinch
• Liberally

3. Both #1 and #2

• Chop
• Dice

While a little research can help with #1, but #2 and #3 are far more difficult to address. These are the things that the aforementioned people learned at some point during their culinary development and that I needed to learn before I could even successfully wield a book of recipes.

The Journey Begins

I did not grow up in a house that placed any real value on tasty food. Food was for sustenance and little more. There are those who live to eat, and those who eat to live; my house was the former kind. I actually didn't even realize that I lived to eat until I was in my early twenties and I had my first extraordinary dining experience. I ate at a restaurant called The Common Grill in Chelsea, Michigan. This was food as I had never tasted it before, from the fantastic basket of freshly baked rolls still warm from the oven to the transcendent creme brulee I had for dessert. This was a revelation.

This next step in my journey began on the day I realized, quite to my surprise, that I could make food that I actually enjoyed eating. This was a complete fluke. I went cherry picking and ended up with far too many cherries, so I decided to try making a cherry pie for dinner and I discovered that not only did it look good and smell good but it actually tasted good as well. I had never been taught anything about cooking and everything I had made previously, though edible, never actually resulted in something I looked forward to eating.

In my new found enthusiasm for food I decided to start cooking more often. This was a disaster. I realized that knowing how to prepare delicious food was not obvious, and following recipes was doubly disastrous. In virtually every case, either the recipe was wrong or I was doing it wrong. On top of that I could hardly even tell which one, and even when I knew it was my fault, I still didn't know what went wrong. So...I decided that cooking wasn't one of my talents and moved on.

Then I stumbled across Good Eats. This was a cooking show that appealed to my inner geek. It was an engineers approach to cooking, a mechanics approach to cooking, something analytical I could understand, not all of that fuzzy, "taste it", "a 'pinch' more", "until it looks right" or "until 'done'." He wasn't there to teach a recipe, he was there to teach the preparation of delicious food in a straightforward, understandable, repeatable way. Give a man some Salmon Fillet en Papillote with Julienne Vegetable and he will eat for a meal, teach a man to make Salmon Fillet en Papillote with Julienne Vegetable and he will learn to cook beef, pork, shrimp, fish, etc. via the "pouch method" and can produce dozens of delicious meals.

That was just the beginning.