the wonderful world of cooking

I love to cook, which you might know. I won't say I'm super good at it (yet!), if only because my repertoire is pretty slender as of yet, but I very seldom produce something I'm not willing to eat which is an improvement over when I started! A major reason I love cooking is that I love eating, and as a picky eater, I definitely appreciate that being the Queen of the Kitchen means I can get exactly what I want. Don't like that spice? Leave it out! Feel like eating half an onion? Throw it in the pan!



Now, I'm aware that a lot of people my age have some trepidations about the magic of the kitchen, and that just makes me awfully sad! Some people don't have the time to cook or access to ingredients, of course, and others prefer premade/processed foods (there are plenty of things that I like just fine out of a box!), but the people who say they can't cook, well...I just have a hard time believing that!

Cooking, at its most basic, consists only of the following steps:

1. Choosing ingredients
2. Combining them in a way you want to eat
3. Heat them until they're done

That's it! Now, sometimes the combining or heating process takes a little more finesse than others, but at its very root, if you can take things you want to eat, put them in one place, and heat them, you can cook. For lazy/busy people, it can be just that simple: the most common dinner by far in Ham House (my former apartment) was a "skillet." We would take whatever we wanted (for me, usually potatoes, onions, and some kind of meat, for my roomie Claire, any and all of the veggies she picked up at the farmer's market) and cook them in a frying pan with butter or olive oil until they were done. Ta-da! (Skillets are super good with egg scrambled in at the end, just saying.)

I personally find it gratifying to have control over what I eat; I know exactly what went into everything I make. Plus, it's always fun when people are impressed with what you made, especially when they expect someone your age to be living off ramen!

So I might not be quite as fabulous as Miss Dita up there in the kitchen, but it's worth a shot! (I do have a cute apron, but I always forget about it until after I'm done cooking)