Food, Glorious Food

I am a pretty good cook, or so I am told. I love cookbooks and cooking shows— I used to watch The French Chef and The Frugal Gourmet on PBS long before there even was a Food Network. I actually saw Julia Child shopping at the Whole Foods near my house a few years before she passed away. I (and everyone else in the store) followed her around and tried to sneak a peek into her cart to see what she was buying.

I could  (and I do) talk about food all the time. The college I went to was next door to the Culinary Institute of America, and I had several friends there while I was in school. One friend used to call me in the middle of the night after he had prepared or eaten a particularly impressive meal. He would describe every detail of every dish from amuse bouche to dessert and each wine that paired with each course. I guess not everybody would appreciate these late-night foodie calls, but I loved it. I only wish I had been able to eat some of those amazing meals.

Unlike my friend, I have had no professional training and I have just learned by trial and error. I love to read cookbooks, but I rarely use them when I’m cooking. I just get ideas from them and wing it when I start cooking. This usually drives other people crazy when they want the recipe for something I have made and I can’t really give them one since I didn’t measure anything. I only use recipes and exact measurements for baking, when the wrong proportions of ingredients could mean a flat cake or cookies like hockey pucks.

My kids are obsessed with the Food Network and play pretend cooking games all the time, but getting them to eat the kinds of dishes they see on TV is a little more challenging. Most of the time, they turn up their noses at the food I make, but most kids probably don’t want to eat pumpkin-chipotle soup or flatbread with figs, caramelized onions, rosemary and stilton, but I don’t mind. More for me!