don't forget the plum sauce

For years I've been meaning to learn to cook.

I LOVE food. Love it. If there's anything that brings me joy it's a luscious cake just coming out of the oven, or a perfectly shaped sugar cookie with a dollop of pink icing, or the smell of yeasty bread rising on the stove top. I love grilled steaks in the summertime and roasted turkeys at Christmas. I love hot cross buns on any and every holiday, but above all, I love when I don't have to do the cooking! Baking I can handle. I'll never forget bringing my first prize winning brownies home proudly from the exhibition, and suddenly having a terrifying flashback to putting plum sauce in them instead of corn syrup. I'll never live that down, even though they still were great! Still, though I can bake, I've never cooked as much as a hot dog. Why? Who knows. I'm a fan of the carb and the dairy - breads and pastries, milk and cheese - when my family is away I dine on pancakes and icecream. So I've had a long history of Not Cooking.

When I was little, my father and I baked together from an Anne of Green Gables cookbook, and proudly displayed our linimint cakes and our ruby tea biscuits. (We're both big fans of Dessert.) The supper table, however, was different. Supremely picky, my brother and I would sit there for hours rather than choke down whatever green and/or healthy thing was on our plate. When my mother decided to cut sugar and white flour out of our diets, that was just the last straw. Finding a candy in a coat pocket was a field day, and to this moment I cannot stand the taste of a whole wheat bagel. (I take my bagels white, with cinnamon and SUGAR please!) Thankfully, this phase didn't last very long, in the scheme of things.

My best friend from high school and I - our memories together - mostly revolve around food. Unhealthy food. We've split so many fries with the works & root beer floats that they all blur together in my mind. Same goes for the Greco pizzas we've consumed, while watching musicals on television, and of course the greasy chinese meals late at night aren't forgettable either. Then there's the chips and pop over a good game of Clue, and the fact that we drank a gallon of milk in a sitting, and are proud of it still. (Why... why?!)

Now in college, if there was anything to complain about it was most certainly the food. There was no robustness to the limp pasta, the fake meat, or the frozen vegetables. There was definitely no health to the soggy french fries, the re-heated pizza, or the grilled cheese sandwiches (some with the plastic wrapper still on the cheese). But that isn't to say that there wasn't a certain delight in complaining about the cafeteria - our lot was so hard - we deserved sympathy & bonded together against the mercenary adults who simply thought we were whiney teenagers. Didn't we know so much better? There was delight, too, in the microwavable pot roast we carved on my friend's dorm room floor. Delight in the peanut butter we ate in spoonfuls for protein, the Swiss Chalet delivery chicken dinners that fortified us through exam time, and the frozen cheesecake that was our only stab at luxurious food. And of course there was a certain desperate hope that this was the last time we would make a trip to the bookstore for chips, pop, and chocolate.

Now I'm moving on to a new stage in my life. The moving-out-of-dorm-into-real-house, almost-time-to-fully-leave-the-nest stage. And it feels... like I'm finally going to learn how to cook. So since my family left me lonely at home while they set off on vacation, it's a prime opportunity for me to practice. Last night I looked up a recipe for fried steak & pulled out an apron. Around ten, the smoke dectector went off - or would've, if the batteries weren't out of it (preparation, you see, is more than key when cooking) - and I was crawling around the floor looking for the fan, cracking the windows, and throwing a blanket over the bird cage so he wouldn't suffocate. The steak sizzled happily and the pasta bubbleth over. If you happened to have driven by, you might have seen a coughing girl in a long brown apron out on the deck, scraping black stuff out of a smoking pan with a spatula. Still - as I slumped messily at the table, with my charred steak & buttered parmesan pasta set before me, cookbooks & papers all around and smoke lingering at eye level - I thought - hey - I CAN cook.

It was a delicious moment.