It’s no real secret (except for the fact that this entire blog is kind of a secret) that I can’t cook. Being the child of a stay-at-home mom meant that almost all of my meals were taken care of for years. My first four months on my own were spent consuming large quantities of canned fruit and Wendy’s. (The canned fruit was a brave attempt to stave off scurvy, which was clearly my largest dietary concern). My last roommate will provide ample anecdotes of my culinary curiosities such as: the steak that caught fire, the pizza that needed to be dipped in beer because it was the only way to make it pliable, etc. Even after getting married my greatest achievement is probably bolognese sauce and most of the time I can’t even spell that properly.
My wife, as fantastic as she is, has been plagued with dietary problems most of her life. This past summer she was diagnosed with gluten intolerance i.e. she has celiac disease. Suddenly fast food, pizza, and most other restaurants were totally inaccessible to us. By some happy coincidence, that same month we moved to within 15 minutes of a celiac-friendly grocery store. But then a month ago we discovered that the wife may also be lactose intolerant. Hooray! Now her favorite comfort food, cheese, was also off-limits. After recovering from the initial shock, we found out that some cheeses were still okay, thankfully, but a lot of recipes that involve cream or yogurt were a bit tougher to pull off.
So for many months I’ve been making pastas with rice spaghetti and pre-packaged pad thai. It’s been sufficient, competent food, but it hasn’t been much.
To summarize, I am a mediocre chef who suddenly lost many of my comfortable easy options for cooking. At the same time, we’re quickly running out of places to eat out and we’re getting kind of sick of making pasta every third day.
So this weekend, something broke.
Instead of doing the most productive thing with my time (i.e. my taxes) on Saturday I decided to Google gluten-free perogies. At some point, I zoned out (as I usually do during Google or Wikipedia searches) and wound up here: Karina’s Kitchen. I don’t know what kind of evil sorcery this woman employs, but in the past two days I’ve managed to cook four of her recipes. Karina is amazing and her recipes a) sound delicious and b) are eeriely easy to make.
I’ve even baked. Twice. Before this weekend I’d baked maybe three times in a decade. There is something amiss here, but I don’t know what it is.
And it gets even weirder: I BOUGHT A CAST IRON PAN. I don’t know anything about cast iron pans. I didn’t even know what seasoning a pan meant before Saturday! What is going on?!
Needless to say, I completely screwed up the seasoning on Saturday (wrong kind of oil) … but I fixed it yesterday, and tonight I made cornbread. Cornbread! Italics abound! Exclamation marks run amok as I completely lose myself in my own little blog posting world where everything revolves around food that was concocted via knowledge made only possible by DARPA.
Sorry, what?
Anyways, here’s a list of what I made:
Not a single problem in the whole bunch. All were winners. Some modifications were necessary (can’t find Green Chiles in suburban wasteland of Surrey, buffalo sausage contained milk ingredients(!) so we just went with ground buffalo, we made our own salsa from the Rebar cookbook), but everything tasted awesome.
The only downside was that everything seemed to take forever to make, but that’s probably only an illusion created by my addiction to the internet and driving. With a little bit more foresight and planning, I hope to go an entire month week without dining out.
In conclusion: I cook now?
