Cooking

This I feel is a basic skill.  We watch a whole pile of cooking shows here at home of the Kitchen Nightmares, Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen variety and just started watching Worst Cook in America.  It boggles my mind that anyone can be that bad at cooking in general.  One girl said she could not even boil water before she came on the show and I really do hope that was an exaggeration.

I learned to cook a few things before I was even a teenager.  Actually in grade two our class learned to cook grilled cheese sammiches (yes I know it’s spelled sandwiches) at school on day using a toaster oven. I could make soup (but really if you can’t make soup from a can I weep for you) and hotdogs.  Side note about hotdogs apparently some people think it’s odd that I cook them in a frying pan – and now in the toaster oven on the odd occasion that I have one, I think boiling them is ridiculous, some much better by the other methods unless you have a barbeque handy.  Oh and I could make Kraft Dinner by then too, which due to a video I watched last night is Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in the US – ours is better by the way.

KD vs KM&C ooohhh try it with ketchup on it, or cut up hotdogs or bacon into it, so good! Yeah I was doing that at 12 too, I was a chef even then.

Now, of course, I can cook all sorts of things.  The worst thing I have ever made as far as I am concerned is Mr. Noodles.  Not that I cannot make it, but just that it was, by the hundredth time I made it, inedible.  I have not eaten any since and that was ten years ago at least now.  My biggest cooking failure that I fed to other people was biscuits because we did not have any baking powder and it substituted baking soda – they are totally not the same thing even though they both start with the word ‘baking’.  It was like trying to eat hockey pucks.  The taste was not too bad, but you needed a chisel and mallet to break them apart.

I don’t really know what the best thing I make is now.  I make a pretty mean hamburger (now with ground chicken!) and amazing homefries (no deep fryer required).  Baked pasta is always good and maybe one of my favourite things to eat, I do have the quick version and the extra cheesy version of the same dish.  No, I’ve got it, breakfast bake, that’s probably the best thing I can make,  It’s not overly hard and I got the recipe from Chef at Home with Michael Smith.  Get a baking dish, a bunch of eggs, some day old bread, cheese and sausages.  Cut up the sausages, grate the cheese, scramble the eggs and season them, cut up the bread into cubes, mash the whole pile of that together in the baking dish and them bake it until it’s done.  So Good!

But back to the main point.  Cooking is a basic skill, if you struggle with it, go get some pointers or take a class, it’s cheaper and healthier than ordering out and way more satisfying to your tummy and your ego to cook your own food.