The well-known adage “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” isn’t really based in truth. I know plenty of old, I mean senior people (not dogs,) who have never left the learning curve and strive to obtain new knowledge every day. And that goes for the culinary arts too.
For yours truly, cooking meals that are flavorful and appealing to the eye comes rather naturally. Or at least I thought so. Then the pandemic began, and we found ourselves fully dependent on my ability to turn out meals at least once a day every day for an indefinite length of time.
As the months wore on, cooking adventures became more like drudgery than cookery. My ability to cook main meals had a pattern that I couldn’t seem to break. Pasta and veggies, pasta and meat sauce, pasta cold as in salads or hot with some concoction plopped on top. Rice and beans, mildly seasoned or simply warmed up straight from the can – thank you Mr. Bush bean man. Chicken prepared in every conceivable way, same for fish. Beef, pork, turkey in rotation doing do-si-dos around a dinner plate. Boring.
I like salads of all sorts, but not so much my husband, so I took to putting veggies in sauces and heavily into soups to ensure he wouldn’t need dietary supplements to survive. I felt responsible for his physical well-being. He was becoming less and less the man who would eat anything after finding chopped spinach is everything.
Six months into the isolation I got sick of cooking and eating my own feeble recipes. What was once a pleasurable escape, dicing and chopping, sautéing and stewing, baking and frying to Motown tunes blasting in the background (Grandma got to get her groove on every now and then) became work versus hobby.
Inspiration was needed. New tricks and ideas had to be found. Thank goodness for the Food Channel and PBS. Enter Julia, Jamie, Jacques and of course Martha. I tuned into Milk Street, Cook’s Country Kitchen and that Cajun cook whose name escapes me now. What these maestros could do to a chicken breast bordered on miraculous. It was a revelation. My “I eat anything” husband would not perish for the lack of a well-rounded meal. The only problem was me.
But cooking takes a lot of work, a lot of standing on one’s feet. So after a full day of PT, standing at my computer working and walking the dog, the prospect of more upright activities was rather painful. I had to find a way to prep elements of a meal so that when it came time to actually cook, most of the sous-chef stuff was done, and I could breeze through cooking our supper.
Right about now you might be asking yourself why I haven’t mentioned cleanup after cooking. Full disclosure – he does most of it. I’m blessed with a husband who doesn’t mind washing dishes, loading a dishwasher and cleaning the stovetop. Amen! The fact that I do have to QC some parts of the kitchen isn’t worth mentioning. Forget I mentioned it. I cook. He cleans. Period.
I gauged my energy level to be moderately high until about 3:00 pm, then it took a nosedive oftentimes requiring a nap. So if there was some way to get most of the prep stuff done ahead of time, I’d be golden. My freezer would become my new best friend.
Onions, peppers, potatoes, celery, carrots and garlic are now stored in meal-ready freezer bags. If I need an onion, I simply grab a prechopped one from the freezer, place it in the shimmering olive oil and enjoying the luscious fragrance. Problem solved. No more daily chopping, grinding, mincing or julienne slicing, everything is done in advance. This doesn’t solve those courses that require fresh, not previously frozen ingredients, but I digress.
Still, every action has an equal (if opposite) reaction, we are taught by Mr. Newton. My freezer is now packed with small plastic bags of frozen vegetables, some of which are hard to distinguish from one another. I run the risk of putting celery into a simmering pot when I meant to put in fennel. Not all solutions are bulletproof. Now I often hear, “Honey, I can’t find the ice with all these damn bags in here!”
The pandemic has taught me I’m not a great cook in spite of what my husband might think. He, after all, will eat just about anything. I realize I can cook about five things really well, and the rest of what I produce is what my father would have called “eatable.” Another man who would tuck into just about anything placed in front of him.
The bitter truth is I’m sick of cooking every day. While on the one hand I appreciate that we have food, on the other hand I’m tired of stirring the pot. I just don’t want to cook any longer.
I’ve toyed with the notion of going to a raw-food diet. That’s a thing, according to my internet sources. I know I could survive quite nicely on foods processed in my gut rather than on my stovetop, but that same man who will eat anything isn’t so willing to make the leap to uncooked foods, primarily plant-based. Bless his heart, he’s in the kitchen now sputtering about, getting his own meals from now on. Hold on a second, I think I hear him yelling in my direction, “Where do you keep the B*%#! can opener?!” Give me strength.
PS: Note to C.O.A. directors, maybe you could offer cooking classes for despondent home cooks and their partners. Just saying…
This Mattapoisett Life
By Marilou Newell