Category: Cooking

For the love of god don’t use a frying pan with hot oil without a shirt on. Ouch.

Today was a good day. I woke up early and went skiing. It the last day at Bluewood, and there were lots of people there. The skiing was decent, but not perfect. It got a little warm and the sun melted a lot of snow, making it really heavy. We would hit a sunny patch and slow down to the point of almost falling over. In all, though, we had lots of good runs; flying through the trees, going over jumps, speeding down racing hills. It was great.

After I got home, my fridge looked a little empty. I was able to pull together enough ingredients for a pizza, and it turned out fantastic. I used alfredo sauce on half, marinara on the other half, chicken pieces, and sliced portobello mushrooms (why, you ask, do I have portobello mushrooms when I claim to have an empty refrigerator? *shrug*). As for cheese, all I had was a bit of moldy cheddar, but I cut off the mold and was able to spread the rest out over the pizza. I enjoyed my pizza with a good Chateau St. Michelle Riesling.

I have been avoiding the part of my story that is relevant to the title, though. It happened when I was spreading the dough. I got a pan, lined it with oregano infused olive oil, and began spreading the dough into the pan. I spent far longer than I should have trying to spread it out over the whole space. I kept spreading it too thin, and it would develop holes in the middle. I’d pinch it back together, but the dough just wasn’t enough for the pan. Eventually, I realized that it was arbitrary that the dough should fit the pan. It didn’t have to. I just needed to have some dough in the pan spread out enough for me to put on ingredients. Then I thought about how I’m spreading myself so thin just so that I can fill every hour of the day with an activity. It’s not right. There’s not enough of me. I should fill enough of my life to make me happy and make the filled part better quality.

After a very successful day at work in which everything went exactly as planned and I was more productive than a chainsaw in a bamboo field (you could argue that that’s destructive, but cut me some slack), and a good day of racquetball where my cheapo racquet was like a sword that struck down those who wished to oppose it, I felt like making a good dinner.

A perfectly cooked New York steak started the meal, accompanied by blanched asparagus and fettucine in marinara sauce. The kid in me demanded chocolate milk, and I was happy to oblige. Leftovers tomorrow are going to be awesome.

Last night I made a decent dinner. Decent may be an understatement, but I’ll let you decide. Wild sockeye salmon in garlic butter, sauteed mushrooms (also in garlic butter), asparagus, a baked red potato, diced tomatoes in a spicy vinaigrette, and accompanied by sourdough french bread and chai tea. It was actually to my benefit this time to have a small kitchen because I was cooking so fast that having pieces further apart would have given me more trouble. I even had my timing correct so that all of the dishes were ready at roughly the same time, and believe me, knowing when to start the water boiling so that it’ll be boiling 3 minutes before the salmon is done is as much an art as it is a science. The neat thing was that I was able to do all the prep work as I was cooking, so from start to finish was just about 15 minutes.

Sometimes quick dinners turn out very well. The other night I combined the two ingredients in my fridge that were not condiments. My cod and celery combination actually turned out to be a spectacular dish. Sometimes I make a horrible mistake; do not ruin salmon with barbeque sauce. But those are opportunities to learn.

If there’s one thing I learned from Iron Chef, it’s that ingredients are the building blocks with which gustatory art is created, and creativity and willingness to match ingredients, coupled with a foundation of knowledge about the indredient and what it can and cannot do, are an extremely important set of skills in cooking. I didn’t learn to cook from Iron Chef. Who uses white truffles or foie gras regularly anyway? No, their knowledge of exotic ingredients is useless to me. What I learned is how to use timing, how to use smells, how to think about the ingredients, and how to come up with creative solutions for new dishes.