Alexis blogs

Ever since returning from holiday break, I’ve been fixated on learning how to cook.

Growing up, I never had to learn even the bare basics of cooking. I’d watched Mom and Dad cook many times, but I’d never really paid attention. To my eye, they simply performed some sleight of hand with pots, pans, utensils and ingredients, and out came a meal.

Oh, I knew a few things. I could bake brownies from a package using the recipe on the box with relative ease. (I enjoyed baking; the magical numbered dial on the oven eliminated such hard-hitting questions as “How high is ‘medium heat’?”)

I could do noodles. (Boil until noodley.) I could do toast. (Place bread in toaster. Toast until toasted.)

Really, that’s all I felt I needed to know. When I moved into a college dorm, I didn’t even have a kitchen. I mastered the art of EasyMac (disgusting) and ramen (unsatisfying), but mostly I just ate campus food.

Now I’m in an apartment. I have a kitchen and, by god, I am going to use it.

Mom supports me in this endeavor with enthusiasm. She’s been trying to get me cooking for years. For Christmas she bought me two cookbooks, one of them entitled Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen.

She happily answers all my phone calls with what must surely be the stupidest questions she’s ever heard. On my last shopping trip, I called her two or three times asking what to buy and where the heck it was. She successfully directed me to the seasoned breadcrumbs, even though I was shopping at a Kroger she’d never set foot in before.

So now I’ve made a few things: potato soup, ranch chicken, grilled cheese. The cookbooks have been very helpful. They speak on my level. (”To hard boil an egg…”) I still have to follow the recipes more or less as though they were the operating instructions for the mechanical device that would prevent the world from exploding.

I still get a sense of amazed accomplishment when I follow some instructions using pots, pans, utensils and ingredients, and out comes a meal. I compare it to the feeling I got in that photography class I took: shine some light on a piece of paper, dip it in some stuff, and out comes a photograph. It’s so simple!

Then again, I’m a bad photographer.