Apr 02 2009
I’m Not Julia Child
I think I’ve written about the mental block I have with meal planning in the past. If not, well, see, I have this huge mental block with meal planning. I just have a hard time coming up with meals that 1. make me want to cook them when I come home from a long day at work 2. my husband will like and 3. won’t bother my bland-is-grand stomach preferences. Oh, and I want to keep mealtime exciting too - not serving the same thing every night. And I don’t want to use all the pots and pans we own to prepare dinner. Got all that?
Before I met Mister, I had a pretty boring diet. I figured I could cook, but for one person who really, really likes pasta and can’t afford much else, I ended up eating a lot of pasta. Particularly pastas that come in boxes with little envelopes of powdered flavoring. That suited me just fine. Once in awhile I’d get a craving for something else, so I’d buy the necessary ingredients and make myself a serving of whatever it was that I craved. Then I was back to pasta.
After I met Mister, I started cooking more, but I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. Mister guided me through some basics so that we wouldn’t be eating pasta all the time. Veggies I can more or less handle, provided it’s something that I’ll eat, but meats perplexed me. Not only did I not know how to cook meat, I was also afraid of cooking in a stainless steel frying pan. I’ve chiseled quite a bit of food out of stainless in my day, and I was none too eager to do it again.
So, fast forward to today. Earlier in the week, I saw roaster chickens on sale at a great price, so I bought one. I was looking for boneless skinless chicken breasts because I’ve gotten quite good at that particular cut of meat, but the store didn’t have any. I saw the roasters on sale and figured it would give us quite a bit of leftover options (I’m even worse at leftovers than I am at planning that first meal). After consulting a few cookbooks and websites, I figured I knew what to do.
Until I realized that all those recipes were for a 2 1/2 - 3 lb bird. As I discovered at 6:00 this evening, mine was twice that size.
No worries, I said. Everything will be fine. Our Thanksgiving turkey cooked a lot faster than we thought. So tonight, after the allotted time, I took the chicken’s temperature and all was well, according to my digital meat thermometer. I took the chicken out of the pan and placed it on a platter to rest. A few minutes later I noticed lots of red juice. I know that when a chicken’s number is up the juices will run clear, so this was not right. I consulted with Mister and after telling him my story, he advised cooking it for another hour. Which I did. Which means that my 5-6 pound bird cooked at 375 for the same amount of time that my 11 pound bird did at 400 for an hour then 325 for 1.3 hours. The same amount of cooking time for two vastly different sized birds.
Dinner tonight was frozen pizza for Mister (thank goodness for 2 cooking racks in the oven!) and a blue box of dinner for me. I had the blues. But I would rather have had chicken.
Maybe one of these years I can cook absolutely delicious meals like my friend Uncommon Jasmine, whose husband must have the happiest tummy in all of Canada. Maybe someday I’ll be able to do something with every ingredient you could throw at me. Maybe someday I’ll be able to effortlessly whip up a cozy luncheon for seven or so people without feeling like I need a nap before the food is on the table. Maybe someday. Today, however, I’ll continue to be inspired by cookbooks, cooking shows and cooking websites as I try not to disappoint with my mediocre skills in the kitchen.
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8 Comments to “I’m Not Julia Child”
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I also do not cook. So now I just ignore the kitchen altogether and Mason makes the food. It’s good. :-)
I don’t mind the actual cooking process. The meal planning sucks, and trying to come up with the energy and enthusiasm is difficult. And the letdown when things don’t turn out the way I envision is a bit of a downer. But the acutal process I enjoy. Mister doesn’t do the cooking unless I get everything ready for the crockpot. He can cook, but he’s more of the consultant as far as our cooking goes.
I have never to date posted a response to one of K’s entries, but in her defense she is correct she is no Julia Child. First off she doesn’t get sloshed on white wine while she cooks and secondly when I married her she in fact could cook a complete meal. When Julia Child first got married she was such a failure as a cook she had to literally go take cooking classes to learn to cook! Now whether she was such a bad cook that she drove the cooking instructor drink and copied that habit too we will never know.
KL4W would like you to think that she is culinary challenged - this simply is not true. Her only problem in the kitchen is that if everything isn’t picture perfect the first time then she sees it as a huge FAIL. This simply isn’t so. As I have explained to her before, cooking is 25% science and 75% art and well we all know that some of the best art and science also owe a lot to luck. In the case of last nights chicken, that was still clucking a bit. She should have been around the year one friend of mine made a holiday turkey that had a bad case of stigmata after 6 hours of cooking at 450, turned out that that was was sold to her as a fresh turkey was actually frozen in the center and no one knew. Or the time my mom made tuna casserole and forgot the tuna, which if you ask me it was fine because that was perfectly good tuna wasn’t ruined! Or a friend of mine who’s aunt put pop corn kernels in her holiday dressing before stuffing the turkey - and I mean a whole bag - and then put the turkey in the oven. I thought it sounded like a made up story as well until I met some other family members who actually started to reminisce about that day. Or an ex wife who decided that meat was meat and made a lunch meat omelet out of Oscar Meyer luncheon meat.
Yes there are true culinary horrors out there but none committed by our KL4W… Well with one exception: smiles, which is elbow macaroni hot dogs and tomato soup… it’s a long story don’t ask… it’s a childhood favorite of hers and she doesn’t make me eat it (largely due to the fact she doesn’t want to clean up vomit) so its all good!
As for the rest of what she cooks, it’s all quite good and very delicious. She just needs to ease up on her self and realize that some times good is fine and it always beats flames, food poisoning and the aforementioned smiles!
Aww, you’re so good to me! And I did think of a good thing about last night’s chicken - I don’t have to cook tonite!
LOVE YOU!
Hmm…we all have problems in the kitchen rom time to time. You’ve witnessed a few of mine. LOL. I am sure you’ve heard about the time I readied the coffee pot to run, and forgot to put the pot under the coffee maker!
On a positive note, how about some crock pot meals? There are lots of chicken or beef dishes you can cook in there. I have a few favorites, not to mention the pea soup. It’s really nice to come home after a long day at work and smell dinner!
We do crock pot stuff once in awhile, and since I leave so darn early Mister will put it all on for me if I get it ready and leave him a note. Crock pot stuff is my favorite because I don’t have to do anything when I get home except dish it out!
BTW, you’re not the only one I’ve seen do that when making coffee. Try it in a commercial coffee maker that needs the pot underneath it before you pour the water in - or try pouring in water without the filter basket in place! Good thing I don’t drink coffee :-)
I guess I mostly cook (simple stuffs, I’m not a great cook!) because I have frozen meals, plus it’s a cultural thing I think. As a French, I was used to fresh food and I have troubles with frozen stuffs or take out.
I like pasta too, nothing wrong with that! ;-)
Zhu, I try to keep it simple too - with only 2 of us there’s no need to get super fancy, and if I’m cooking for a crowd I want to keep it simple because it’s hard to coordinate a large meal if it’s complicated. Here in the States, like most people I grew up with far too many convenience foods, and here in NV it’s hard to get really fresh food, so that makes things difficult.