This is going to sound really odd, me being officially an Old Fat Guy, now. But I really don’t know how to cook much. When I was single the second time my mother taught me to make a stir-fry dish that was nice. And I did pretty well with my slow-cooker stew for about three years… but I’ve lost all of those skills and now I basically wander into our home’s food temple only to heat things up. Frozen pizza, tater tots, breakfast sandwiches, pot pies and of course TV dinners.
I enjoy watching a few cooking shows with Kathie. From time to time I’ll pause the action and ask her why this or that happened the way it did and I’m fascinated with the answers. But I really couldn’t take anything from this box and mix it with anything in that bottle and make anything that should ever appear on a plate. And I wonder how anyone ever got it to happen.
Someone was wandering around a field somewhere, saw some little doo-dads on the ends of a plant and thought, “Say, that looks tasty!” After two or three iterations they learned to take off the stalks and just throw them away. A generation or two later, someone decided to grind it all up into a powder first and then put it in the fire. On and on it goes like this until finally one day someone invents lasagne! How does that happen? I mean, how many things did they have to try before they found the winning recipe? “Hey! Maybe some tree bark would make it better!” Ooops. “Well, maybe we just had the wrong kind of tree!” A couple of years later they have proved that tree bark doesn’t belong in oatmeal.
David Brenner the comedian used to have a bit about “The bravest man in the world” who turned out to be the guy who said, “Whatever falls out of the back of that chicken—I’m going to eat it!” But seriously, how did anyone know? And who was the first guy to take the egg and run it back to the above who was experimenting with tree barks? “No! Try it with a egg!”
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, knew how to cook. Every Friday she would make meat loaf out of whatever leftovers she had, and so we ended up with some fantastic meatloaves, and never had the same one twice. She could dance around the kitchen adding a pinch of this and a dash of that and blending in a quarter cup of something else and throw it all into the oven and amaze us.
I’m still amazed.
