Cooking, Writing, Learning

My wife was a little worried she was shirking our shared duties. "I'll help you cook in a little bit, but I need to finish this." I was peeling garlic. I told her not to worry about it. I'm not feeling obligated tonight. This is fun. I'm in the mood. I had the ingredients set out, pots on the stove, and a recipe in my head. Go Go Penguin was on the speakers. The dog waited for me to drop cheese. I'm good, I told her. The stars were aligned. The moon was in the seventh house. All of that.

Peeling garlic, done correctly, something I've only recently learned though I've been cooking with fresh garlic for twenty five years, is a soothing meditation. So too is chopping it with a good, sharp knife. Better still if I've sharpened the knife on my own stone, something friends helped me learn after many failures on my own. It's a skill I'm still honing. Rocking the knife on the bamboo board, turning the chunks of garlic into tiny mince, feels good. Smells good too.

A friend wrote of his first attempt at aging beef. It didn't go well. "This experiment went, in a word, wrong. Horribly, terribly wrong." This is the point when I often have to step back, curse all over the place, give up and swear I'll never try whatever it was again. It takes a while for me to cool down. Sometimes I go back to it, but it takes longer for me to get to the attitude he expressed in his very next sentence: "The good thing about failure is there is so much to learn from it. The bad thing is I can be a really slow learner." He's anything but slow at these things. He is dogged and skilled, something I've admired about him from the first. Often I need to remind myself that he's learning just as I am.

The garlic minced, I diced an onion and threw that in a pan with some oil. The garlic followed shortly thereafter, the sauce shortly after that. I put the cover on, checked the water in the big pot I had put on to boil, and, back at the bamboo board, grated cheese.

Baked ziti, at least the way I make it, is the easiest of dishes to prepare. No need for a recipe. It's a natural progression by now. Because of that, my mind can wander as I cook. Good thing I was done with the knife and am pretty well wired not to grate my fingers with the cheese. I was thinking about learning and change, advancement and mastery, practice and discipline.

A well-meaning friend, as several others have before him, stated that there isn't any money in the writing I'm doing and trying to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. SHut up. There's also no money in the short run I took earlier but I ran anyway. The other night when I said that I had to get a blog post together, my wife asked, "do you have to?" She was trying to give me permission for a break, but yeah, I have to. I've posted every day this year and am learning something from doing that. "The bad thing is I can be a really slow learner." The only way forward that I know of is to just keep going, slow and steady, and see what I can make happen.

The water boiled and I dumped in a bag and a half of pasta, stirred, rested the spoon on the stove, checked the sauce and adjusted the heat while I stirred that. I preheated the oven and brought out the big glass pan. Every so often I stirred the pasta and checked the quasi-recipe in my head for mistakes and omissions. The water bubbled and boiled, the pasta floating calmly in that storm. I watched it boil and waited as the minutes uncoiled on the timer.

There's no money in the things I'm doing but there seems a clear future in them. Not that I see the future clearly but it's clear to me that this is my future. It's such a big part of my present and has been a huge part of my past. I'm following it, trying to learn, wondering how to make some kind of leap.

The friend who is aging beef waited forty-five days to find it hadn't worked. Maybe someone could have intuited earlier that it was going wrong, that there was no profit in waiting. Maybe that would have been more convenient and less painful while being just as instructive. Maybe. But I doubt it. The very idea of aging beef for so long sounds ridiculous, counter-intuitive, maybe even foolish. Food is supposed to be fresh! My friend knows better than that and he's willing to stay in the game until he has it down. He will listen to advice but he needs to learn it himself.

Me too.

I drained the pasta, poured it back into the pot, took the sauce off the heat and poured that in. The parmesan went in along with a tub of cottage cheese (my family doesn't go in for ricotta) and some of the mozzarella. I add an egg too, don't tell anyone. I mixed all this up in the pot, poured it into the glass dish, sprinkled with more mozzarella, covered it with foil, and put it in to bake. Even before I uncover it for the last five minutes of baking and smell the goodnes, I know just how it will taste. I've learned this thing by heart. I've got it down. It will be perfect.

As for writing. Who knows? It might make money or it might not, but it will teach me something. There's no guessing about that. I've already learned plenty from it. Enough to know to keep going.

Not Squash & Pear Soup

The recipe is in the box. Pull the card. Get out the cast iron dutch oven that isn't really a dutch oven but that's what we call it. Put it on the stove, turn the heat to medium, and throw in some olive oil. Grab an onion and chop it coarsely. Add that to the pan. Next up, the squash and the pears. Plenty of pears in the bag on the counter. The squash is easy, it's pre-chopped in the fridge. Open the door, pull it out, peel off the plastic, and, what's this? Why is it white and mushy? We were supposed to have this soup three nights ago. Stand over the open package of rotten squash and wonder what's next.

The onions are sizzling. Stir them in the oil. Lower the heat. There were carrots in the fridge. Lots of them. They're still good, right? Grab the computer, type "carrot pear soup," and hit enter. Click on the first result. At this point there's no good in being choosy. Those onions are cooking. A pound and a half of carrots. Go to the fridge, pull out the bag, dump the carrots on the counter. They're okay. Good in fact. Grab the peeler. Peel those carrots fast, chop off the ends, roughly dice them. Try not to cut off any fingers.

One by one, add the chopped carrots to the not quite dutch oven to bring down the temperature and maybe save that poor onion. It doesn't matter how many carrot peels are all over the floor and counter. They can be cleaned later. Peel, trim, chop, and get them into the pot. Grab the bag of pears. They haven't gone bad. Hell, they're not even very ripe. This soup is going to need some extra broth or stock, whatever we have. Peel, core, chop, and get them into the pot. The recipe says two pears, but what do they know. Make it four. Maybe five. It's tough to count at this speed. Still have all ten fingers. No blood.

The recipe calls for four and a half cups of broth. Those carrot peels all over the floor and counter would have been good for making broth, but that ship has sailed. There's no broth in the fridge. Got to be a couple cartons in the pantry. Go get them. Open the pantry, search on the shelf where the broth is. Then search the other shelves. Search them again. Of course there's broth. There's always broth in the pantry. Keep looking.

Go to the computer. Type "replacement for vegetable broth." Swear at the suggestion "use beef or chicken broth." Swear now. It's okay. Go to the cupboard and pull down the measuring cup. Fill it with two cups of water. Dump that in the not dutch oven. Fill it again and dump it. Get half a cup more and pour that in. Now, make half-ass stock.

Pull down the kosher salt and add generously. Pick up the pepper mill and grind it sixteen times. Think it over and then grind eight more. Stand at the spice cupboard and work through the alphabet of spices. Allspice but not basil, coriander, ginger, dill, and ground mustard. Pinches and shakes. Why not garlic powder? Sure, give it a good shake. Give it another. Stir whatever it is in the pot. Admire the yellow color of the not-broth. The orange carrots that aren't squash. The browned onions. The under-ripe pears in great number.

Bring this to a boil. Inhale. Not bad. Almost smells like soup. It might even not smell like a mistake. This thing that was supposed to be one thing is something else now. What exactly isn't clear yet. Answers will have to wait. For now it's enough to have made something with all that squash rotting in the garbage and all the plans from early this week in there too.

The recipe was in the box. The directions were clear. Turns out that some important ingredients were missing. These things happen. Often. What happens next is important. Something has to be done. And there's no one else to decide what that might be. Give it a shot. See what happens. Just do something.

These are the things I tell myself.