(Mis)adventures in cooking

I used to think I was a pretty good cook. I had lots of fun as a teenager developing recipes for homemade pizza, and I got pretty good at homemade bread, although I never had much responsibility for preparing the family's meals.

In college, I appreciated the fact that the dining halls provided and prepared the food and cleaned up afterward, so I never complained about the quality of the food.

When I had a family of my own, I got meals on the table and kept my kids healthy, so I thought I was doing okay. 

As divorce and high school graduations changed the dynamics of my family, I thought back over all the years I had admired my grandmother, who had lived alone until she was in her late 90s but, as far as I could tell, had eaten three square meals every day of her life. I don't remember whether she ever had a microwave in her kitchen; about the most advanced "conveniences" I remember were her toaster and toaster oven. But she always took the time to prepare and eat good meals.

Not so much me. I figured out a long time ago that I don't need to eat "three square meals" every day, partly because I have a tendency toward hypoglycemia that doesn't necessarily like me to wait too long between meals. And I don't need to stuff myself to feel satisfied. So left to my own resources, I'm likely to snack a bit here, nibble there, and usually wonder whether I get any real nutrition in the course of a day. (With modern agriculture and grocery shopping being what they are, I'm not sure anything we eat anymore has much nutrition in it by the time it gets to the table.)

Part of my agreement with Number One Son to let him room with me has been that he is in charge of KP, which he interprets to meaning cooking but not so much cleaning. He's really a pretty good cook and he works hard to try to balance meals so we both get appropriate amounts of protein and veggies. But he's been on vacation for the past week, so I've been on my own.

I know I can still cook some, at least: while NOS and I were in Los Angeles for Christmas, I puttered around in the kitchen a bit to help Darling Daughter with meals. (She had planned mostly eating in, which thrilled NOS who got to work with her on their favorite shrimp stew.) Mostly, that turned out all right, despite my lack of expertise with a gas range.

One of the meals there had been a dish my mom used to call "oven-fried chicken," which is merely a cut-up chicken dusted with flour and seasonings and drizzled with butter, then baked for a bit. DD had boneless breasts on hand for making them, and while they turned out all right, they didn't have the usually crispy coating because the flour didn't stick too well to the naked meat. I figured I could experiment with a version of that dish for myself; maybe coating the bird with the butter before the flour would have a better outcome. (Not so much.)

I also had a squash and some spinach on hand, so I decided a those could round out my meal. Unfortunately, I started sauteing the onions for those about a year too early, so I had onions that were something beyond "caramelized" by the time I got ready to add the veggies. I split the soggy onions into a nonstick pot for the greens and a ceramic-coated cast-iron pan for the squash; turns out the nonstick is still the better deal for cleanup, even though my little bargain-buy cast-iron was kind of fun to use.

I had cooked earlier than I usually eat so I could watch the old John Wayne version of "True Grit" on tv, and I left the cookpots on the stove for cleanup later. During the movie, I heard some rattling around in the kitchen, and sure enough the bigger dog, Tank, had helped himself to licking out the residue in the cast-iron pot.

I gave in and moved the pots to the floor for the dogs to finish licking out before I stuck them in the dishwasher, then loaded in the rest of the dishes before closing down the kitchen for the night.

Regardless my ineptitude, Tank must have really appreciated the leftovers; he left his grubby ball on the stove in trade.