People who know how to cook are pretty cool. Not only do they make delicious things that you can eat, but they can also have a mastery of a basic life skill.
Cooking is a basic life skill that even cavemen mastered and is also a skill that I had avoided learning until this past summer.
(OK, I actually don’t know anything about cavemen or if “cavemen” is still a term people even use, but this isn’t an anthropology column, so for argument’s sake, let’s just say they existed and knew how to cook and maybe even had, like, a cave-painting version of the Food Network or something and move on. Cool? Cool.)
Anyway, for the first three years of college, I’d managed to get by on my staple meals—PB&J (on toasted bread!), frozen hockey pucks/veggie burgers and the delicacy that is microwavable pizza.
My justification for my habits was simple: Cooking took too much time, both to learn and to do. Why spend hours preparing a pasta sauce when there’s a box of delicious dinosaur-shaped noodles sitting in the pantry, waiting to be coated in milk and cheese dust?
But things changed this summer when I got to thinking about how prepared I was for the real world. As I worried about my ability to get a job and pay bills, it hit me that after three years of higher education, I still couldn’t even really feed myself.
Naturally, I decided to treat my sorrows by opening up my laptop and wasting time on the Internet. After getting bored with Facebook and Twitter, I turned to Pinterest. Then, I had an idea. What if, instead of looking at the 100 or so pictures of food with accompanying recipes I had saved on Pinterest, I actually cooked, one of them. Boom.
My solution instantly led to another question: What to cook?
As I scrolled up and down my homepage, I waded through maybe 53,284 pieces of food porn. Approximately half of the recipes required some kind of dishware I don’t own, ingredients I’d never heard of or a creative use of zucchini and/or cauliflower.
So, after eliminating recipes that fell into the above categories and determining any attempt to cook meat would certainly result in food poisoning, I finally settled on a recipe for spaghetti squash pad-Thai. Despite the dish’s fancy name, the recipe didn’t sound too complex.
After a trip to the grocery store, I was ready to get cookin’. Basically, the recipe instructed me to bake the spaghetti squash, saute some vegetables, prepare a peanut sauce, then mix all those things together. I decided cutting an onion was a little more work than it was worth, but other than that, I decided to follow the recipe to a tee.
I was sure disaster would ensue. I imagined a squash explosion. Vegetables flying everywhere. Peanut butter smeared over everything. Smoke detectors blaring. A trail of soy sauce, pepper seeds and my tears spanning the distance from the stove to the pantry, where I would hunker down with a box of s’mores Pop Tarts and weep.
While it would make for an interesting column if I were to write about blazing flames and exploding vegetables, the recipe actually turned out smoothly. To my surprise, the product was not only edible, but… good.
The success of that cooking project inspired me to take on another. Then another. After a few more meals, I could say I actually knew how to cook!
Now, I still have a place in my heart and stomach for mac ’n’ cheese dinos, don’t get me wrong. But there’s something about preparing the food for myself from things that contain actual nutrients that is surprisingly satisfying.
So, to my fellow Badgers who want to learn to cook for yourselves, my advice is to go for it. Aside from the mess and possibility of setting your place on fire, what’s the worst thing that can happen?
Were you hoping for a vegetable explosion? Have one of your own to share? Tell Rachel about it or just send her some recipes by emailing rmschulze@dailycardinal.com.
