cooking as a metaphor for life…

Or something all profound and thoughtful and deep. Lately I have been stricken with Cooking Madness, as I concentrate on eating healthy food. And of course the New Stove has made cooking WAY more fun. Although I’ll venture a guess that it will be much more enjoyable in a few months when it’s not already 80 degrees in the house before I turn on the oven. Good thing I like heat! But even before the new oven, I was cooking a lot more. A few weeks ago I bought Moosewood Restaurant New Classics –

Wow, that’s  a big picture. Well, it’s easy to see what a wide variety of tasty dishes it contains. It’s something like 300 pages long. And the night I bought it I couldn’t put it down – I kept going from one recipe to the next. Saying, "Yum!! YUM!!!"

I got this one because I wanted Vegetable Heaven which Cousin E loves, and although I could order Vegetable Heaven from Amazon (and still plan to, although I think I’ll go with the $8 new copy as opposed to the $120 new copy)  when I decided I wanted it I decided I wanted it right that very second, so I went to our local bookstore to see if they had it. And they didn’t, but they had this one. And it looked really really good.

SO I’ve made quite a few things out of it already. And every single recipe I’ve made has been delicious. But every single recipe has been, oh, not perfect. Every single one has had some sort of problem. Not a problem that rendered it inedible, but something went wrong that should not have.

And do you know why things went wrong that should not have? Because I can’t follow directions, that’s why!!!

Seriously. I can not follow directions, and I seem to be completely incapable of reading a recipe through before even starting it. So that I, like, know what to do. Not reading it through first combined with not paying attention to what I’m doing combined with being extremely scatterbrained does not make for success in cooking. So, for example, when I made the delightful Moosewood Muffins, and instead of creaming the butter and sugar and then adding the egg and the rest of the liquid ingredients, I dumped it all in a mixing bowl and THEN looked at the directions and said, "OH. Oooops!" So the muffins tasted great but did not rise up and were not light and fluffy. They were more like tasty rocks.

And do I ever learn? Well of course not. I’ve always cooked like this. It’s probably why although I enjoy cooking, I’ve never been known as much of a cook. At all. Night before last I made a stirfry. The stirfry was out of a very old cookbook – Enchanted Broccoli Forest, which is of course an early Moosewood related one, which is why I want the other ones. I’ve had Enchanted Broccoli Forest since I was in college, as you can tell by the spills and messes and writing all over the pages. And while making the stirfry I try to read ahead. I really do. I try to sit down and read the recipe in advance. But somehow I don’t. And in the middle of the recipe I’m going, "OH. Ooooops!!!" It was still delicious, but not quite, ummmmm, right. Because I mismeasure and leave stuff out and put everything in backwards.

SO. Last night I make a fruit soup. I swear that I will READ THE RECIPE. And I try to read it ahead. Once again, I really do try. But there I am, mid-recipe, realizing that I’m supposed to blend the fruit and the coconut milk and the almond extract and the ginger and the fresh mint up FIRST and then add the brown sugar to taste. At that point I’ve once again dumped it all into the bowl and started blending. All except for the extract, of course, which I have completely left out. After making a special trip to the store for it.

But I just whisked it in last and it wasn’t too sweet because I added less than the minimum amount of sugar it called for. Actually, it’s AMAZINGLY good, and I’m kind of shocked because it is made of the one fruit I’ve always thought I just despised – cantaloupe. I always thought cantaloupe made me, literally, nauseous. Then last summer I tried some in a fruit salad and realized, ummmmm… it was pretty good. And in this soup, it is REALLY good. I think it’s called Asian Fruit Soup because of the light coconut milk and the ginger – it’s very Thai.

Speaking of Thai, I’ve made Pad Thai twice now. The first time it was kind of, ummmm, weird. Because I did it all wrong. Because I can’t follow directions. The second time it was much much better. I guess the key is to just keep making stuff until I know how to do it even when I don’t read the directions first.

And my whole point with that deep and insightful metaphor thing is that it’s not just cooking. It’s not just reading the recipe ahead and planning out what I need to do that I have problems with. I also can not look ahead in my life and see what I need to do in order to end up with the result I want. I’m as slapdash with Life Planning as I am with cooking. I throw everything in the bowl and THEN I go, "OH. Ooooops!" I end up with something weird that looks nothing at all like the picture in the book. But, you know, it still usually tastes fine. So I guess it’s what works for me.

And that’s quite enough deep thinking. I’m even worse at that than I am at following directions. Time to go take a walk.