Cooking

I love to cook.  Our Mother encourage me to learn everything I could about anything I could, and cooking was one more of the things that she taught me.  Truth be told, I think she did so more out of concern that I might find myself alone and wanted to be able to take care of myself.  No matter, I appreciated it as it gave me time with her and in the end I developed into a decent subsistence cook.

No chef am I.  The term gourmet is better applied to my reading tastes than any culinary ability I could ever possess.  Even so, I appreciate the skill, effort and knowledge it takes to be a good cook.  That explains my attraction to the relatively recent surge in interest in cooking shows.  I'm even aware of some of the luminaries of the culinary world like Mario Batali, Bobbie Flay, Thomas Keller, Eric Ripert and Wolfgang Puck.  Heck, I even read Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw on vacation.

I might be interested in being a chef if it weren't for cooking things I detest, like eggs.  I can use them in baking, but the thought of cooking an egg makes me gag.  Right there I'm disqualified from being a chef.

So a cook it is.  I have what I think are my specialties.  What they are in fact are things that are hard for me to ruin.  Thanksgiving turkey, blueberry pies, salmon -- things that I both like and have prepared over and over again.

One of my favorite memories is from my time in Spain.  At Christmas, four of us expats -- a Jew from Boston, a Colombian, a Mexican and myself -- were without a place to go, so I volunteered to make a Christmas bird.  What I'd forgotten to consider was where I was supposed to find one.  Somehow, and I don't remember how exactly, I was led to a store somewhere in the 'burbs of Madrid where they were sold.  I bought all the fixings and lugged them on the Madrid metro to Boston friend's house where I cooked the bird.  There was snow, although it was little frigid, but that turkey and stuffing transported me back to the Midwest and our Mother.

Another time, some of the guys from my dorm floor at school broke into a frat's kitchen during a frat party and stole some frozen turkeys.  Although I wasn't with them, they brought it to my house since I lived right around the corner.  I got all the ingredients for the stuffing and prepared a feast for my thieving friends a couple of weeks later.  Basically, we ate the evidence.

I used to bake but that was discouraged in an earlier relationship.  My efforts weren't appreciated because the items I made weren't to her and her family's liking.  I miss baking.  Mom and I used to make all sorts of things that were both tasty and festive.  Mom even wrote out a little booklet of our favorite recipes and illustrated it with her own works.  It was even laminated so that it wouldn't be ruined.  Subsequent moves have caused me to misplace it.  I hope someday to find it.

Our present kitchen is about the size of a large locker, almost too small for me in which to manuever.  I may take up cooking and baking again someday, but I think I'll need a larger kitchen.

(c) 2012 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles