MISADVENTURES IN COOKING



I'm a pretty good cook.  I kind of wing it in the kitchen - to me, that's the fun of cooking.  When I read a recipe - and I read recipes for entertainment - certain combinations of ingredients sound good to me, so I try them.  It's the way I put together colors in clothing too: I see em, I like em, I put em on.

I don't cook much from recipes.  I used to, but I don't anymore.  The key to cooking like a lot of other things is Go Forth and Conquer.  Do Not Be Afraid.

This is now.

When I first started cooking - or let me amend that: when I first started having to cook - I was about 13.  My mother was going to school one or two nights a week, and the food prep was up to me. She left things like chopped meat for hamburgers and frozen vegetables - this was pretty elementary cooking - but I liked a challenge!  One night, I took the chopped meat and the frozen vegetables and cooked them along with some seasonings including soy sauce and ketchup.  Not a match made in heaven.  My dad went out for a walk after dinner - something he never did, but it was a nice night, so I didn't think much of it.  Years later, he told me he'd gone out to get something to eat.

Things improved, although not immediately.

When you live on your own and you don't really know how to cook yet, baffling things happen.  The stuffed cabbage I bravely tried took hours.  So did everything from the "60 Minute Cook Book."  And then there was the dinner party.

Or more accurately, the dessert for the dinner party.

It was a strawberry sherbert-y thing.  I didn't have an ice cream maker (I still don't), but this recipe said you could put it in ice cube trays in the freezer and take it out every few hours and stir it up, then put it back again.

The recipe itself was a little odd - it even identified itself this way.  It called for 1/4 cup of salt.  "You'll think this is a lot of salt," the recipe said and yes, I did, I thought it was A LOT of salt, especially for sorbet.  But the salt, the recipe said, would bring out the flavor of the strawberries.  Who was I to argue, I recognized myself as the amateur, I went along, although I did check and re-check the recipe.  Yup.  Quarter cup.

So I made it, and I put it in the ice cube trays and I took it out and stirred it up every few hours.  It had a very nice texture.  I never tasted it though.  I was too tired to taste.

At least, I didn't taste it when I made it.  Or when I stirred it.  I tasted it about 5 minutes before the guests were too arrive.

A quarter cup of salt is A LOT of salt.  It was very pretty to look at - beautiful texture and color - and it was inedible.  SO SALTY!  When I went back and looked at the recipe again, it didn't say 1/4 cup.  It said 1/4 teaspoon.  Someone had obviously changed it.

For a minute I thought about serving it anyway - I'm ashamed to admit this, but it is true.  My dinner guests were in the hall.  What was I supposed to do?

But in the end, what you're told when you work on a newspaper also holds true for food you're planning to serve: When in doubt, leave it out.  Or in this case, throw it out.

Thank God for Hagen Daazs.