The only thing that Julie from the movie Julie and Julia and I share is a name. I have never lived in New York City (although I certainly would if opportunity afforded it), I am not a newlywed (we’re clocking 13 years over in this corner), and perhaps most critically, I do not enjoy cooking.
I just don’t understand how people love to cook. It’s sort of how I just can’t understand how people love to go running. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to be able to cook and run, it’s just that I find myself facing a lot of failure when I do so. I have tried to acquire both skills on countless occasions.
And I will continue to try. Unlike the ‘movie Julie’, I don’t find cooking to be a way of releasing stress after work. Instead, I find it to be a stress-inducer. This stress is beyond the fact that, for a parent, cooking dinner is often just another chore on a very long list.
For me, cooking = failure, even public ridicule. I’m not even kidding — my parents love to tell a tale of how when my mom asked me to put spaghetti sauce in the pot, I took the sauce and dumped it into the wrong pot. Yep, I dumped it in the boiling water. Hardy, har, har.
But, like I said, I’m going to keep trying at this cooking thing. I know I’ll never be a Julia Child, but at least I could pitch-in on this often tedious family chore.
My first step? It’s a cookbook called 4 Ingredients. Hey! Don’t laugh — it’s the number one cookbook in Australia. I picked it up while I was living in Sydney last year and hadn’t really even touched it except for a salad recipe that I used on a girlfriends’ getaway to hide my utter incompetence in the kitchen.
The whole premise of the book is that all its recipes involve only four ingredients, and they’re not weird ingredients that you’d have to hunt down at a specialty food store.
Tonight, I looked in the fridge and we had chicken breasts. Alrighty then … I looked into the “chicken” section of 4 Ingredients and found some possibilities. “Hon,” I said, ”if you want to take Stella to Jiu Jitsu, I’ll do dinner tonight.”
There was a long pause. Then he said, “uh, okay, sure.”
I picked a recipe called “Curry Mayonnaise Chicken.” (By “curry,” they’re referring to British curry, as opposed to Indian curry. It’s not spicy; it’s perfect family fare.) I thought hubby would like this, being Australian and having tastes that veer towards the other side of the pond.
This is it:
1. 6 chicken legs
2. 1/3 cup mayonnaise
3. 3 tsp. curry powder
4. 2 slices wholemeal bread, grated into breadcrumbs
Combine mayonnaise and curry, coat legs with the mixture. Roll in breadcrumbs and bake in a 180 C for 45 minutes or until tender.
Everything was going smoothly until I realized that the timer for the chicken was just about to beep and I hadn’t even starting boiling the potatoes (potatoes and salad were my side dishes). I opened the oven to see how well-done the chicken was. It looked kind of pink.
“Hmmm,” I thought, ” poisoning the family will sure go down in the family ridicule books.” Not good. So I checked the recipe again. It was 180 Celsius not Fahrenheit! I was cooking on Fahrenheit, so Mr. Chicken needed a lot more time.
Long story short — no one got poisoned, family was suitably impressed, and hubby has now declared a “Mommy cooks one night a week” event.
So, did they actually like the meal?
Hubby gave it an 8/10. Stella gave it a 9/10. I gave it a 6/10 (I’m not a huge curry fan).
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Now THAT sounds like something I could try!
I think you're looking at this wrong, it's not one more failure, but successfully figuring out one thing not to do the next time you cook. If you keep the lists as the things you've figured out, what to do and what not to do, eventually your what to do list will look longer than the what not to do list. Timing things to come out at the same time isn't the easiest thing to do, sounds like you worked it out though.
Mom of Three and Diana – thanks for reading and commenting! And you're right Diana, eventually I will have a longer list of successes than failures. In fact, every time I try to cook I seem to learn at least one or two new things. I may have started late at this game, but eventually I'll hit a half-decent level, right?