Kimberly Emerson

I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately, but all of a sudden I have this overwhelming desire to cook.

This is unusual for me.  As a single woman, I’m accustomed to a lot of take-out.  Trust me, I’ve heard all the arguments against this:

• Eating out is expensive.  You could save so much money cooking for yourself.
• Take-out is bad for you.  When you cook for yourself, you can control the amount of fat/salt/cholesterol/MSG/(insert bad thing here) that goes into your food.

And my personal favorite:

• How can you eat that?  Don’t you know all the disgusting things that happen in restaurant kitchens?  (I have one friend who uses this argument against participating in potlucks, too.)

Somehow, even with all these compelling points in their favor, my friends and family had, until recently, not persuaded me to spend any quality time in my kitchen.  It always came down to the same thing.  I worked a full-day, and frequently had somewhere to go in the evenings.  The last thing I wanted to do was put even more energy into cooking for myself.

Lately, however, I’ve been cutting down on my extra-curricular activities, trying to free up more time for writing.  I’ve also taken up running (and that is a whole other story, which I’ll tell some other day).  My weekends are a little freer, and I’m paying more attention to what happens to my body.  (Hovering on the edge of 40 will do that to you.)  Plus, I spent Martin Luther King Day weekend with my friends Deborah and Winston, who cook a lot.  On Monday Deborah decided to make ginger snap cookies, just because she wanted to.  The concept boggled my mind.  She didn’t need to bring them to a party?  She hadn’t promised them for the choir reception at church?  She wasn’t taking them into the office to get out of buying everyone Christmas presents?  No, actually.  She was just in the mood for ginger snaps.  By dinner time she was making pasta from scratch, for the same reason.  I shook my head in disbelief and told myself it was just the influence of the kitchen.  Deborah and Winston have a great kitchen.  I’d cook all the time too, I told myself, if I had a kitchen like that.

After making the eight hour drive home, however, and eating a lot of fast food, I was thinking fonder thoughts of cooking.  As I’ve said before, my condo is 450 square feet, so as you can imagine, the kitchen is nothing to write home about.  It has very little counter space, a couple cracks in the walls, and the occasional bug who comes in to share my cat Zoe’s food.  (She does not share well, but she is good at killing bugs.)  But it’s clean (well, for the most part) and has a good supply of bowls, pots and spoons.  It could do the job.

Where to start?  I have a fairly good sense of my own limitations, so I knew the odds were good I wouldn’t be making homemade pasta anytime soon.  But pasta sauce – now, that was doable.  I don’t have an impressive collection of cookbooks, either, thanks largely to the eating-out thing, but I had an internet connection.  The perfect marinara sauce was within my grasp.

 I found a recipe that had five ingredients (anything more that, I start to hyperventilate and check for the exits).  Yes, I did use canned tomatoes, but I think I deserve a few points for buying whole canned tomatoes and putting them through my own small food processor.  And after amassing the five ingredients, I started to add others.  It needed some onion, I decided, and a bell pepper.  And some red wine.  I knew enough about tomato sauces to know that red wine does nice things for them.

When I was done, I had a very flavorful concoction, but I don’t know if you could actually call it sauce.  It more laid on the pasta than actually integrated with it.  But it was darn tasty.  A little heavy, thanks to a half cup each of olive oil and red wine, but enjoyable, nonetheless.

Well, this success went to my head.  I started thinking of other things I could make.  A colleague who knows that I avoid dairy said she’d just found a great new cookbook called Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.  I don’t often order cookbooks for myself, but with a name like that, I was tempted.  Just to be sure, I found a recipe from one of the authors on the internet, for pumpkin muffins.  Okay, not a cupcake, but at least I could check out their grasp of baked goods.  They were amazing.  Lighter than the average pumpkin recipe, and moist and delicious.  I ordered the cookbook.  I was on a roll.

This past weekend I made more marinara sauce (still too thick, but I’m getting there) and a bean soup.  The starter package for the soup, which included the beans and the spices, had been in my closet for oh, at least a year.  Probably more than “a” year, actually.  I checked the internet (it’s like having a cooking teacher in my house, I swear) and found out that if the beans are old, they’ll be tougher to cook.  No problem.  I had time.  I had lots of time.  The only other thing I wanted to get done this weekend was launch my website, and I could do that in an hour or so, while things were simmering. 

Old beans take a LONG time to cook, I found out.  I let the soup boil gently on the stove, longer than the two hours the package suggested, but the beans were still hard as a rock.  Finally, I turned up the heat.  Thirty minutes later there was marked improvement.  Okay, I thought confidently.  Another thirty minutes at high heat, and the beans will be tender enough to eat.

As it turned out, I was right about that.  Unfortunately, I did not stir much during this time, and I didn’t get the spoon down to the bottom of the pot, where much of my ingredients were busy searing themselves to the metal surface.  By the time the second thirty minutes was up, I had a stew-like concoction with virtually no liquid left, and a half-inch of ingredients lost forever in their quest to become one with the pot.  Yuck.  But a lot of time and ingredients had gone into that pot, so I couldn’t just dump it.  I added more water and took a taste.  Not bad.  Not the best thing I’d ever had, and still not exactly soup-like, but not the disaster that I feared.

When all was said and done, after draining off the soup that I could and scraping the rest of the charred remains into the trash, I had a four medium-size plastic containers full of food (and one scarred but still serviceable soup pot).  I put the marinara sauce in the freezer (there is only so much pasta a girl can eat in a week and maintain her size-8 waistline) along with two helpings of the soup.  The last of the soup I put in the fridge.  Despite the fact that the soup couldn’t be counted a glowing success, I was pleased with myself.  I had made my own frozen dinners.  I could pull something out and defrost it, and still be eating a home-cooked meal.

It probably helped my motivation that it’s been rainy and cold here lately.  One of my favorite mystery authors, Diane Mott Davidson, has a caterer for her main character, and talks a lot about the therapeutic properties of cooking.  This weekend I began to see her point.  Cooking warms the house, literally and figuratively.  The oven is on and burners are working, so heat (and at least with soup, moisture) is added to the air.  (Which would explain why none of it remained in my soup.)  In addition, cooking is life-affirming.  On the most basic level, you’re making fuel. Specially designed energy that will help your body get through another day of activity.  It’s a lot of work, but at the end of the work, you get to feast on what you’ve made.  (Okay, I had another helping of pasta with marinara sauce before I froze the rest.  And it was delicious.)   It’s a pleasant way to tell yourself that yes, there will be a tomorrow, and I will be ready for it.

Who knows how long this cooking jag that I’m on will last.  But I’ll enjoy it in the meantime.  If it does peter out after a while, I will still have learned some valuable lessons:

• Eating out may be expensive, but cooking at home ain’t cheap either.  After all, good food depends on good ingredients.
• Yes, you can take things out of the recipes that you make at home, if you want less salt, butter, etc.  But cooking depends a lot more on what you put in that what you take out, so if you’re taking out the butter and the salt, you better have some really creative ideas what to put in instead.

And lastly,

• Restaurant kitchens are probably no worse than my own.  

Hey, I had a clean kitchen once, but that was before I started cooking.

Tags: cooking, humor