Chefs

I like to cook.  I'm no chef by any means.  Our Mother used to teach me things when I was younger out of fear that someday I might find myself all alone without anyone to cook for me.  I'll never be one to cook outstanding meals.  I may, in fact, be little better than a line chef at a diner-dive.

Even so, I appreciate what people can do in the kitchen.  To that end, I enjoy watching some cooking shows, chief among them Top Chef.  I admire their skill and knowledge and marvel at what they're able to whip up under time constraints and with the pressure of the $125,000 prize hanging over their heads, not to mention possible elimination because something wasn't seasoned enough.

Every once in awhile I give flight to my whimsy and wonder whether I could have ever done it.  After all, I like to cook and I love to eat.  But when I get down to brass tacks, I know it's not something that would ever have happened.

Why?  Well, for one reason, I can't keep track of the times that certain things require to be cooked correctly.  I can barely time dishes to make sure everything comes together for weeknight dinner, let alone keep track of several dishes at once.  Then there's the notion of keeping track of every ingredient of what is a classical hollandaise sauce, or how long you cook an egg for hardboiled or softboiled (more on that later).

Then there's the whole French thing.  I hate the language, frankly, and to have to use it to communicate in the kitchen bothers me.  Mise en place?  Seriously?  Why do I have to use French terms for Spanish dishes?  I don't think so.

Then there's the smell of foods.  I can barely smell certain foods.  I can smell strawberries and garlic just fine, but I can't smell a lot of other things.  The danger in this, of course, is that I might not be able to smell foods that are just past their dates.  Horribly putrid things I might be able to smell, but I wonder.

Finally, I don't like certain foods.  On Top Chef, people have either won or lost based on their seared scallops.  For me, ironically, I'm allergic to them -- horribly.  So I wouldn't know what a good scallop tasted like if someone offered me Bill Gates' fortune to tell them.  And eggs....to quote Karen, sort of, blech.  I hate cooked eggs more than any other food.  I cringe when I see someone embellishing a dish with a cooked egg (egg on hamburger?  that's just blasphemy to me...).  And yet, cooked eggs feature in many of the dishes chefs make on television.  I just couldn't do it.  I can use raw eggs in baking, but not cooked eggs on any level.  When I get fried rice, I ask that it contain no egg.  That's another smell I have no trouble recognizing, and it makes me heave.

For those reasons, then, it's best that I never went into culinary school.  Sure, it would be cool to be able to tell people that I graduated from the C.I.A., but I wouldn't want anyone to die at my hand.

Besides, I wouldn't look good in those tall chef hats the French love to wear in the kitchen.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles