I don’t know if any of you were in a situation anything like mine. If you identify, let me know. The problem was that my mother didn’t teach me how to cook, so as a young woman I was very much lacking in self-confidence when it came to cooking. Plus dinner preparations in our parental home were less than optimal. My mom woke up from a nap and went into the kitchen, not wanting to deal with us kids, and fixed something simple like hamburger patties or hamburger helper, and warmed-up green peas with a salad. There was always a salad, and that’s what she asked one of her daughters to fix. Honestly, my mom was and is a wonderful cook. She can do amazing things with food when she needs to. I’m just giving you a worst-case scenario. Still, I didn’t learn much about cooking.
Also my grandmother, her mother, was a fantastic cook. Dinners at her house were always wonderful. But neither of them took time to teach me how to cook, except for one incident I clearly remember. My mom wanted to teach me how to bake a cake and so she taught me - from a box. I remember baking a marble cake - I think it was chocolate cake mix with white cake mix swirled in. Now, that was a good, positive experience, and I thank Mom for it. But when I was 18, on my own, trying to start a family, I was clueless in the kitchen. I knew how to make grilled cheese sandwiches from processed prepared sliced cheese, and a tossed green salad, and oatmeal for breakfast, and that’s about it.
Of course this didn’t go over good with my first boyfriend (later he was my first husband) but he tried to help. We lived in San Francisco - at first in the Haight Ashbury, then in Noe Valley, and later in the Haight Ashbury again. At that time we started making bread together every day. He knew more about making bread than I did as apparently his mother did it. I, however, had never seen anyone making bread.
I’d seen my grandmother making pie dough. Once when I stayed with her as a teenager she decided to make a peach cobbler. I asked her to teach me how but she said something like, “Not now, I’m busy, I just want to do this and get it over with.” She put flour in a bowl, then butter. This she cut in with two knives. Nothing was measured. She poured in the appropriate amount of water, and voila! Perfect pie dough. Then she lined her 9×13″ pan with dough, put two big cans of peach slices in, poured in some sugar… again, no need to measure anything. Then she covered it with more dough and put it in the oven for an hour or so. It always came out perfect and I learned almost nothing about how to do it myself. I think I tried to make a peach cobbler once and it didn’t turn out nearly as good as my grandmother’s.
Anyhow, back to bread-baking in the Haight Ashbury. I tried every day to bake bread right, but usually it was a failure. Usually the bread didn’t rise right, or wasn’t cooked enough, or something would happen to make it less than perfect. It took months before I could produce edible bread. Somehow I had decided I couldn’t cook, so I couldn’t. A self-fulfilling prophecy. I knew nothing about being the kind of woman who could prepare a wholesome meal every evening, regularly and dependably. Plus my boyfriend and I had different eating preferences. I was a vegetarian; he wasn’t. He brought in steaks to cook for himself and didn’t want most of what I wanted to eat anyway.
So that was the beginning of my cooking career. I wish I’d worked in a restaurant back then; it would have made me feel much more comfortable with the issue of cooking food. Instead I suffered for many years, trying to learn to cook. Even to this day I still have times where a fear of cooking comes upon me. That lack of self-confidence is hard to get away from.
Because of all this, it is strange that I have a cooking blog, don’t you think? I can cook now, and have collected my own workable, practical vegetarian recipes over the years, but I’m hardly a natural at it.
