On cooking, on learning, on studying, on skills.

[sorcyress]

Made potatoes and eggs for dinner^-1, which means this week I have made TWO DINNERS from scratch.

This is approximately the same number of dinners I have made from scratch from the, oh, three years prior to this week⁰.

It is very confusing and I still don't like cooking, but I have an uncomfortable suspicion that I don't like cooking in the same way I would previously say I don't like singing¹. Which is to say, with a underlying current of being a teenaged genius who hates anything they're not immediately excellent at.

Apparently 25 is the age where I start to put actual work into developing skills, instead of just assuming that they should be granted to me instantaneously because I'm awesome. I mean, I still assume I should just get random new skills every time I level up, but I am willing to accept that I am entering more of a runequest model rather than DnD, and only have my skills increase when I actually use them.

Also, I was much younger when I decided I needed to learn how to juggle, and I can do a cascade AND a reverse cascade now and I am more proud of that fact than I am about my kick-ass SAT scores. Because you know what? I have a brain that is excellent at standardized testing. I do not have a brain that is excellent at juggling. But I have a brain that is willing to carry around juggling balls basically constantly for, jeeze, two and a half years now and practice with them in odd moments, despite the surrounding people laughing at me.

I didn't have that skill and now I do, and no, I am not a remotely impressive juggler and might never be, but I can do a standard three ball cascade.

And I don't know how to study. I didn't have to work in school --I failed assignments because they were boring, not because they were difficult. I don't know how to acquire skills I don't already have --and I am blessed with the mind and body to start off pretty good at a lot of skills².

But I didn't know how to juggle, and always assumed it was a lot of flailing your hands around, but no, it's just a lot of practice and trying again and again and again until you can do two catches in a row, then three, or five, or ten.

So I have taught myself how to juggle. And I may teach myself how to cook. I already know some things, I already have some recipes. jere7my's egg salad, Magus's mac and cheese, Natasha's pancakes, Neva's brown sugar icing. My random flailing and throwing ingredients into a pot to make curry.

I might never be able to remember what "simmer" means, or feel comfortable using a "pinch". But I can make a roux and a simple syrup, I can crack an egg one handed, I know how to season cast iron. I don't think I'll ever make pasta from scratch, but you can buy it from the store. The sauce is the better part anyways.

Perhaps the cat ears will become a less foreign part of my costume.

~Sor
MOOP!

-1: You should take this whole entry with a grain of salt, since I am talking about cooking like I'm hot shit, but literally all I did was dice a potato, toss it in some bacon fat, throw on some salt and pepper, stir occasionally. Eventually I pulled the potato off, cracked in four eggs, a dash of milk, more salt and pepper, some shredded cheddar, and stirred a bunch. Culinary challenge, this was not.

0: I assume pasta wouldn't count unless I made the sauce. I made 2 AM chili, back when I lived in Dinosaur Sashay, and I made chicken and rice for SoNSo that one time he was visiting.

1: Granted, I don't ever expect to feel the fondness for cooking that I do for singing, but, you know. I could grow to "neutral to positive" instead of "pretty firmly negative".

2: My ability on stilts is the most recent of these I've observed --I understand the physicality of stilts pretty darn well, and did so from the very first time I was up on them. I pushed myself to learn how to fall, because otherwise I wouldn't know what to do if I tripped.

Comments

[squirrelitude]

I didn't know how to cook -- at all -- until about 2009. Now I'm pretty confident! I can even make bread!

I think the difficult part is just learning how each ingredient responds to heat, water, etc. There's *so much* to know, but you can only understand it by working with each ingredient in different recipes -- a bootstrapping problem. I'm only recently gaining confidence in my ability to not just deviate from recipes but even make up my own.

Like you I have trouble learning things that don't come easily right away, but one of the nice things about learning to cook is that you get *some* results pretty much right away. (As long as your very first experience doesn't set the kitchen on fire, I guess.) I think that's why I now know how to cook and not, say, unicycle.

[genarti]

I totally count that as cooking! And that's a perfectly respectable list of recipes and things you can do comfortably.

To me, a LOT of being a good cook is just practicing enough to have a comfort level. "Would this recipe be good if I changed it this way/added this ingredient/made this substitution? Yeah, I think it would! Hmm, what can I do with these ingredients I have in my fridge? Oh, hey, that's an option." And that's just practice; you play around with a thing until you know what it tastes like, and can mentally map what it would do to the recipe. And sometimes the results are AWESOME, and sometimes they're kinda disappointing but oh well now you know (and usually it's edible anyway.) Some people get the start of that practice as kids kicking around watching their parent(s) cook, and some people have to start it as adults when they're more self-conscious about not already having the skill set, but a lot of it really is just the time playing around and internalizing the general framework of How Staple Ingredients Work.

(My focus is on playing around and going ENH LET'S THROW THIS IN because that's how I cook. I am not much of a baker, and when I do bake I follow a recipe pretty strictly. When I cook, I improvise everything -- even when I'm actually following a recipe without making off-the-cuff substitutions, I almost never measure things. It works great for my brain, up until the point where I have to give a recipe to someone else and they want quantities more detailed than "put in some of this until the texture's right, and cook till done." Apparently my default mode is to cook like a great-grandmother!)

Yes, okay, there are fancy complicated recipes here and there, but how often do most people do them? Rarely if ever, that's how often, because fancy complicated recipes usually take up a lot of time, and you're either doing that for a big fancy occasion or you're doing it because cooking is your self-indulgent hobby of choice or both. But I like cooking, and I consider myself a quite decent cook, and your potato-egg thing is still more effort than I would put in some days for dinner, because sometimes I come home and I want instant gratification and blood sugar, and so it's time for a cheese sandwich or cereal or tortellini with sauce from a jar.

[harena]

My problem was never in the learning of skills, twas in the fact that I simply have zero motivation to cook. I don't like cooking. I am, in fact, pretty good at cooking and most of the things I actually attempt to cook come out Just Fine.

About a decade ago, I was constantly told by people (who presumably wanted to "help") that all I had to do to get myself to enjoy cooking was to practice at it and when I got really good at it, that I'd would find myself liking it more. No, Just No.

ANYway, Ignore Ferret Rant there, Yay for YOU & your cookingnesses! And Juggling (or as f!H would say, "Jgugling!")! :D

[jannyblue]

The only "pasta" I make from scratch are dumpling wrappers... which I learned how to do from a comic strip*, actually.

*Though I did verify the technique with online research from real recipe sites later.

[EDIT]Start reading here for the bit about the dumplings.[/EDIT]