My time in the kitchen would be better spent watching grass grow, paint dry, or my own ingredients expire, untouched.
By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
There was a brief time I left Northern Virginia to rent a house in Italy. The house had an herb garden in the backyard, and I remember that felt appropriate to me—not only that a house in Italy would have its own herbs, but that those herbs were to be available to me. I remember gushing to the landlady about how much I “just love gardens” and “love fresh herbs,” that I use herbs “all the time” in my “cooking.”
What cooking? It must have slipped my mind that back home I’d eaten the same Lean Cuisine mushroom pizza and frozen creamed spinach every night for a year. Privately, the spinach made me feel righteous alongside my roommate, who subsisted on martini olives and blue cheese crumbles she ate straight from the tub. On that vacation, I did cook—boiled pasta and sauce that never saw a scrap of fresh herbs. It was about as local as I was, though in my time there I did learn the correct pronunciation for Prego.
These days, all I want to do is escape to the kitchen. At the end of a 12-hour slog of parenting, I take comfort in the calm of the grater and a potato, which is a vegetable I find versatile and hard to burn. It’s a nice time of day for me. The potatoes aren’t slicking my hair with saliva or cutting their teeth on my earrings.
I find myself cooking a lot. Cooking a lot does not make me a good cook.
That will have to soon change. Won’t it? I don’t see how it can’t. Yet, I don’t see how it will. My son is rapidly approaching his 9-month birthday. I know I can’t limp by on formula and Gerber fruit blends forever. In the near future he’ll be expecting stuff like scrambled eggs and asparagus that’s been made soft, somehow, by me. Eventually we’ll be expected to eat the same balanced meals together, as a family. I can’t pop a juice box into each of our mouths, praying that it takes care of whatever vitamin deficiencies we may be collectively suffering, forever.
My relationship to cooking is like my relationship to knitting. It’s brainless, it’s procrastinative. It is, somehow, productive: I can make a real mess if I go at it for long enough. My best party trick is a wheel of Brie baked inside a Pillsbury dough crescent sheet. Feeling generous? Squirt in some grape jelly. It takes three-and-a-half minutes and is a hit every time.
There have been times I worked from scratch—several dozens of times, a mindboggling number, given the fail rate. Only last month I was baking cookies for myself—just for me, all of them—and got tired of squinting at the Internet through a haze of splattered egg smeared with flour without glasses on (sometimes my son gets bored with the earrings). I’ve made cookies before!, I thought, tossing some flour into maybe a half cup of vanilla. I often grow frustrated with recipes’ underestimation of how long they require. Where does the time go? Toward reading the recipe? (I’ve never read a recipe more than to skim it, which is 100 percent why I’ve never successfully finished anything requiring a stand mixer.) It makes me feel duped. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Not as bad as the vanilla soup with flour curds I tried baking at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
A coworker once told me he knew he was going to marry his wife because the first dinner she cooked for him was ham cubes doused in gravy. He called it “a love that survived the chunks.” His wife had since metamorphosed into a brilliant cook, and this gives me great hope. I think the first meal I presented to my husband was a carryout taco platter from the bodega across the street. My coworker was a kind man; my husband’s an astonishing one.
So far, it has not gotten better. I can admit that on paper, but not over the stove. Every texture of food you don’t want in your mouth—soggy, limp, stringy, burnt—my family’s suffered through for no reason other than my own obstinacy. I’ve spun out a million excuses: I don’t have counter space, the resources, the time. Time is a good one. Time’s a fantastic excuse. It works best if you’re in grad school because no one wants to touch that. Ironically, I think my cooking was actually at its peak levels in grad school.
You can find recipes for anything on the Internet, no matter how complicated, or—more mystifyingly—simple. In .35 seconds, Google turns up 322,000 recipes for wilted spinach. One time, I saw a recipe for eating persimmons. Not for preparing persimmons in a dish containing them. A step-by-step formula for whole persimmons, skin-on, raw. It didn’t make sense, but once I saw it I felt like the recipe must have known something I didn’t so I went out, bought persimmons, and followed the instructions start-to-end. They were OK.
I do have some good memories of helping cook, at a young age. My aunt’s a fine cook, and I remember poring over her cookbooks as a girl, dog-earring their crusty pages. Her neighbor had a cherry tree growing in her backyard, and my aunt makes an unbelievable piecrust. With piecrust, I’ve heard the trick is to work gently and be patient, which goes a long way toward explaining why, for a long time, I thought I helped make those pies. Trying to make pie alone was my first clue. Setting my hair on fire in a toaster oven confirmed my suspicions that my aunt is a very, very nice woman.
My son likes to eat: boiled beans, various earrings, soft fruits and vegetables. No one’s taught him about eggs yet, but the day will come, and I found a microwave recipe for backup. When he comes home with picked cherries, I look forward to pitting them and eating them together, raw. Should the time come that he asks to bake pie, I have a great knockoff—you only need two ingredients, dough crescents and Brie. It should hold him off long enough for me to book him a ticket to Italy, or his great-aunt’s, whichever’s cheaper.
@CitySprawlNVMag is going to post the link to that baked Brie recipe on Twitter.
(June 2014)
