What I Learned, Learning to Cook

Coming into the month of July, we are now about a month and a half away from a whole slew of young adults moving out of their comfort zone and into college dorms with random roommates. Most college kids will be preparing for this move by packing their belongings, ordering textbooks, going back-to-school shopping, spending lots of time with old friends, securing a new apartment, attending orientations, etc.

As a college senior who expects to be graduating this Fall, my advice to incoming freshman is this: spend some time in the kitchen with your mom before you go. This is something I often wish I had done before I ran off to college. Not only is it a great way to spend time with a parent who will desperately miss you when you leave, but also it's a great opportunity to learn some essential cooking skills. I understand many people may not be as lucky as I am as far as this learning experience goes. My mother, and my mother's father, are both cheifs, and have had experience working in the restaurant business. I have lived off home cooked meals my entire life, though I can't say I always appreciated it the way I should have. Things changed when I left for college. It wasn't long before I got disgusted by the Hot Pocket or pizza dinners every night.

If it weren't for the fact that my only mode of transportation was my bicycle, I probably would have gained a hefty freshman-20 from the kind of crap I was eating. For my roommates who had their own cars and ate the way I did, I saw the effects of that weight gain... One word: grotesque. If you're expecting to have this kind of fast food diet, don't bother yourself with having a car. But, if you'd really like to keep that fancy graduation present, start learning to cook your own meals.

There are more benefits to cooking your own meals in college than just helping you keep the pounds off.; it also helps keep your wallet fat. Consider this: $10 will get me one, maybe two meals at any given fast food joint; $10 at Wal-Mart will get me milk, margarine, eggs, and flour, and maybe some Ramen noodles. If you know how to cook, that $10 will get you a lot more than 2 measly meals. You'll need this kind of thrift once mommy and daddy cut your financial umbilical cord, so practice it before you find yourself desperately flapping your wings when you get booted from the nest.

Now, I am aware that sometimes it's very difficult to find the time to do any of your own cooking, what with all the band practice, sorority meetings, study groups, weekly clubbing, political canvassing, campus events, club tabling, and, oh yeah, classes. But keep in mind, saving money and eating healthier doesn't require fine cousine or hours slaving over a hot stovetop; it just requires a little bit of planning.

The first thing I realized when I'd finally started to settle into my first college apartment was that I didn't own a can opener. Most apartments come with a fridge and a microwave, but unless you want to live off Lean Cousine dinners for the rest of the semester, you're going to need some utensils. Wooden spoons, rubber spatulas, whisks, metal spatulas, ladels, and don't forget your can opener. There are also some pots and pans, cookie sheets, mixing bowls, casserole dishes, measuring cups, silverware, potato masher, egg slicer, egg seperator... Not to mention all the plates, cups, bowls, and tupperware you don't own. You might also need a blender, mixer, convection oven, quesedilla maker, waffle iron, George Foreman Grill... These household voids are not limited to kitchen supplies. You still need all sorts of stuff in your new bathroom. You don't even own curtains or bedsheets. Best thing to do is buy all this stuff before the move; that entire first week of school, the nearest Wal-Mart to your college will be hell, so try to avoid it if possible. In preparation for school, I saved up $1500 over the summer. The first month's rent gobbled up a huge chunk of this, and after visiting Wal-Mart and Big Lots, I only had about $100 left. Lucky for me, my mom was willing to foot the grocery bill when I cried out in despair at the realization that I didn't even have any food yet.

For all the things you need to fill your kitchen with before even thinking about cooking, it seems contrary to suggest home cooking is cheaper than fast food. However, when I needed to buy cooking supplies, I mitigated the expense by scrounging used pots and pan off my mother. Even if your parents aren't much for cooking, you can usually find a friend or relative who has a few cooking tools to throw your way.

Once I started trying to cook, I learned that fire alarms are very sensitive. If your apartment complex is even the least bit safety-conscious, your fire alarm will be connected to the fire alarm system throughout the entire building. It's pretty embarassing the first time this happens; everyone pokes their head out their door to see where the fire is, and you step outside, waving a greasy spatula: "Don't worry, everything's all right, I'm just... cooking." You don't have to have a grease fire going in order to set off the alarms; enough smoke will do. For me, I managed to get a quesedilla maker for $5 when I moved in, so I would cook strips of chicken and steak on the stove top, then store them in Ziplock bags in the freezer to use in my quesedillas later. When I could afford meat, this worked out really well. Unfortunately, I never oiled my pans well enough, so the apartment would fill with smoke and it wouldn't be long before it set the fire alarm off. Sometimes this is just unavoidable. A few ways to avoid this happening: open the windows before you start cooking, turn on the fan over the stove, AND dampen a wash cloth and drape it over the smoke alarm itself.

Eventually I realized there were only so many things I could do with Ramen noodles. At first I just ate them plain, and tried to buy a variety of flavors at the very least. It wasn't long before I didn't want to eat them at all. Then I found this book, 101 Things To Do With Ramen Noodles, at Waldenbooks. So far the only recipe I've tried is the Cheeseburger Ramen, but I intend to eventually test the Ramen Omelette recipe on my boyfriend, Jesse. I'm a rather picky eater, so there are a lot of recipes in the book that I won't even look at -- for example, the entire vegetarian section. But for someone less picky than I, it's a great resource. There's actually a whole "101 Things To Do With" cookbook series, but I've only had a chance to sample the Ramen one. The only ones I see that might be useful in college would be 101 Things To Do With Mac & Cheese and 101 Things To Do With Ground Beef. Once I got this book, my mom was quick to help fill my recipe shelf with more useful things: The Doubleday Cookbook Complete Contemporary Cooking Volume 1 (circa 1975) and Betty Crocker's Cookbook (circa 1978). She insisted on getting me the same editions she learned from.

When it comes to recipes, I learned that hand-written recipes are meant for the writer to use, an no one else It was funny, when I tried to make shepherd's pie and chipped beef on toast for the first time from my own mother's hand-written recipes, I screwed up a lot. I found myself calling her every time I started cooking, asking her to clarify something or ask how long I needed to cook this or at what temperature. (This was also part of the reason she got me the Doubleday Cookbook, so I'd stop calling her and asking so many questions. Doubleday does, in fact, have all the answers, even if you want to cook rabbit or brain.) Even using my own mother's recipes, it took several failed attempts before I really got any recipe right. It seemed like there were all sorts of tiny details that were left out; it just turned out that my mother hadn't even thought to write them down, since they were things she did almost automatically. I'm fortunate to have a boyfriend who is not much of a finicky eater, so even the lousy meals didn't go to waste. Now that I've figured out how to cook these things on my own, I've typed up the recipes and printed them on index cards for my own reference. One day I'll probably pass these cards down to my own children, and they will fuck up the recipes just as badly and as many times as I did.

White rice and ginger ale does not make Rice Krispies; sugar and yeast doesn't quite make cream soda; and the Internet is not a shortcut around kitchen catastrophes. Just because recipes you find on the Internet are more detailed than your mom's hand-written notes does not mean they are complete; indeed, Internet recipes are lacking in the aggregate wisdom mom has built up in her cooking skills over the years. No one was there to tell me how different white rice is from basmati rice; no one told me I had to use vanilla extract, not artificial vanilla flavoring, otherwise my cream soda would taste like vomit (once again, Jesse proved himself to be a brave taste-tester). The only Internet recipe I've managed to use without failing was this creamy chicken noodle soup recipe, which I also use Ramen noodles to make.

Holy shit, I forgot about the spice rack! It was actually long after I started cooking before I realized my food lacked spice. For a long time, I got by all right with just salt, pepper, and garlic. But once I got in deep enough, I found I needed thyme, ginger, cinnamon, parsley, nutmeg, lemon pepper, white pepper, cream of tartar, and all sorts of other things I'd hardly thought about until I tasted the recipes without them. Once again, my mom helped me establish my own spice rack; she donated many of her own spice bottles and set up a "starter kit" for me. If I'd had to shop for these things, I wouldn't have known what to grab. Spices can get pretty complicated; the way a great musician must be intimately familiar with the sound of each note, so too must a great cheif be familiar with the nuances of each spice. I have not quite attained this level of mastery, but I did eventually convince my mom to share with me the secret spices she puts in her banana bread (and no, I'm not telling).

One last lesson: don't cry over burnt chicken. But if you do, make sure the person you love loves you back enough to eat it. I don't know what it is, but I get very upset when I mess up a meal, though this only happens when I'm cooking for more than just myself. It means so much to me to give someone I love an enjoyable meal, I feel like I let them down when I mess it up. Jesse never did understand why I cried when the pizza didn't come out right, or when the sauce was always too watery, but he was always there for me when I needed him to eat it and enjoy it anyway. Smiling through a gooey, underbaked crust? -- now that's love.