Learning to cook is an important part of the revolution

When I went to college I had no clue how to cook. My mom, bless her heart, thought that I would be ok, since I could read and was relatively good at following directions. As I quickly learned, any fool – well, almost any fool – can read a recipe and turn out something rather pleasant to eat. I was one of the fortunate fools, but I didn't really know how to cook. I didn’t really realize this until I spent some time in the kitchen with my best friend, A. She is a goddess in the kitchen. She was fortunate enough to get some tutelage in the kitchen from her father who would make her name ingredients contained in dishes he would make. My dad spent time slaving over a hot stove of Spamburgers and toast (although he makes a killer fried egg!). After growing up on chicken and dumplings, lots of TV dinners and who knows how many packets of heart attack inducing Ramen, A. brought a new dimension to culinary masterfulness into my life. I remember eagerly lurking while she cooked in her upstairs apartment on Grand Ave. I wanted nothing more than to figure out how the hell she could do all of that and not have to read a recipe. I did not understand that food actually had a life of its own and if I could understand that life I could make it work for me. Who knew that you could actually put real garlic into food and not just garlic powder?! Having grown up on salad bars of iceberg, I didn’t even know that there was more than one type of lettuce until I got to college. I also had no idea that you could buy fresh vegetables in the store – we always ate them out of cans, if we ate them at all. So, it was a real treat to get to watch A. cook. Her adeptness at knowing exactly what she wanted was astounding. I completely admired and loved her for it. I fell in love with her spirit in the kitchen.

I quickly became addicted to cooking shows. After my classes were over, I would come home and lounge on my beat up green couch and religiously watch “Great Chefs” and Graham Kerr. I learned how to chop garlic and that you can strain all the liquid out of yogurt if you wait long enough. And that more than anything else I desperately wanted a “bash and chop”, which I now own and rarely use. But more importantly, I had my very own personal teacher in A. I would ask stupid questions and she would always answer with a smile. I felt a little bit more empowered because of this. And as time went on, I felt completely empowered by this. The cookbooks started rolling in. I now have two shelves full of them. I started to eat better and feel better and realized that a can of corn or kidney beans was NOT a dinner.

Eventually, A. & I started putting my future husband, M., to work in the kitchen. He was already an exceptional omelet maker, but he learned how to do all of the prep work. It turned out that he was really good at it and enjoyed doing it. It was now a family affair. The three of us ended up living together for a few months and during this time we ate VERY well. My husband-to-be even learned how to make salad dressing. (There is a long story behind that one!) This was the boy that used to eat Triscuits and hummus while standing over the dining room table and called it a meal. Cooking great meals brought us all closer together and gave us something constructive to argue about.

Eventually those short months together ended and M. and I moved to LA and A. stayed in St. Paul. One of the things I missed most in those first months in LA was cooking with A. I felt very lonely and incapable without her there. There was something about being in a kitchen filled with our energy and making food together - an alchemy that could not be achieved alone. I eventually got brave enough to start and do things on my own. I subscribed to Food and Wine magazine and continued to build on my repertoire of food. It was great. My new found skills gave me a feeling of efficacy. I could actually look at a recipe and know where it had to be improved and where artfully thought out methodology was better than what was written on the page.

I know this all seems a little pointless, but I strongly believe that learning how to cook is a very important skill. When people know how to skillfully nourish the body it nourishes the soul as well. A. gave me that gift. And even though she thinks that the kitchen has gotten too small for both of us to be there, I still wait for and cherish those moments. I love standing in the kitchen and bickering about the best way to do things, learning from what we have each royally screwed up in the past, handholding during pastry creation, talking each other down when things flop and total ecstasy when we succeed. Together we have discovered how to make things work - each to her own ability in the extreme. For us, being in the kitchen is, above all other things, a great place to learn what it means to be in a cooperative situation. It is the height of direct democracy and collective decision making, anarchy at work in a fluid fashion.

Resources: RecipeSource - a fantastic online archive of recipes!