Cooking - A Calling and/or A Skill Plus My Cooking History In A Nutshell

I have been thinking about why some people just can't cook.  Honestly, growing up with a grandmother that was a whiz bang cook, it never even occurred to me that someone who attempted to cook could not do so.  It was such an innate thing for her.  She seldom used recipes.  When she did use them, she generally only did so for baking, which she did infrequently.  This worked to give baking a mystical status for me.

When I was growing up, I wasn't very interested in cooking because it wasn't science and because I considered it a gender stereotypical activity.  I was a raging feminist as a child and as a young woman.  After I got married and moved away, I stood there in my own kitchen and suddenly realized that "I have to cook". I had many of the tools I needed, but when it came down to the act of doing it, I realized that I had no skills to speak of.  I had seen my grandmother do things, but never really done them myself.  At first I was daunted, but after buying a ton of boxed food and working at preparing it (hello, Hamburger Helper) I really was not cooking, but I could put something on the table.  I had fallen into the uneducated cook realm.

Oven roasted goodness

After my first marriage ended, I found myself in another kitchen with time on my hands and no one's food preferences to consider but my own.  Being a single gal, I was also on the go a lot.  I ate out most of the time.  But eating out at places that interested me gave me new insights and a desire to maybe make tasty things on my own.  Then one day, I decided to make a croquembouche.  Don't ask me why a kitchen semi-literate decided to take that on.  It was probably because I was kitchen semi-literate.  But, I got my recipe out and started to work.  Something magical happened with that project.  I had fun.  I had a lot of fun, even though the sugar "glue" that was supposed to stick the cream puffs to the form didn't work and I could not really get the sugar to the hard crack stage.  I blame that shoddy little electric stove in that apartment.  I remember pulling the just baked puffs out of the oven and popping one in my mouth.  IT WAS DIVINE!  I liked trying this new activities and I liked the results, even if they ended up being a tray of cream puffs instead of an elegant tower of tasty goodness.  I had just been bitten by the cooking bug.

The pureed peppers about to become Sriracha

Things kind of progressed slowly from there.  I was still a single girl and eating out was still a major means of putting food in my gut.  I was still building a flavor palette, though.  When I met my current spouse, that did it.  We started cooking together and have not stopped since.  That's not to say that we don't cook separately.  We do.  But we still like to cook together and to enlist the other's advice if we're working something up from out of our heads or tweaking a recipe.  Hub is an invaluable help to me as he helps me consider options and alternatives for my dish or cooking method.  I would like to think I do the same for him, plus delivering the services of a finer grained tasting ability than he seems to have.  You should see us standing in the kitchen tweaking and tasting a pickling brine or sauce.

Beautiful home made ramen with quail egg

So there is the story of my cooking life.  What does this have to do with it being a calling or a skill?  Well, I think it answers the question, in a roundabout way.  I think I have been called to cook, but the call came later in life, upon my joining in the adventure of marriage with my Hub and finding the joint passion we have for cooking.  I also think that along with him, I have acquired the skill to cook rather well.  So the answer is cooking is a calling and a skill.  Isn't this the way with all callings?  We are not born with an innate ability to be a cook no more than we are to be a doctor.

I do think that there are people who will always perform the activity of cooking more proficiently than others.  That will be because of the passion or calling, but it will also be because of their innate abilities.  I often talk to people about cooking and making up my own recipe and they say "How do you know that will work?".  When I say, "Well, I thought about the different flavors of the ingredients and decided they all went together." they're taken aback by that statement.  I have been concomitantly amazed that others don't have that ability.  When I think of foods, I generally think not of just the way they look, but the way they taste and smell and even sound.  Think of a platter of sizzling, smoking, fragrant fajitas being sat before you.  Get it?  Can you taste them?  Some people say that they can't.  How sad that is to me. Being able to imagine single constituent flavors and then bring them together is a skill or natural ability that allows me to just wing it to make things come together in a pot and on a plate.  I don't think this ability is required to be a cook, but I do think it helps defines what I think of as a "natural" cook and someone who is a practiced cook.

Our first attempt at making our own pasta

I am also very fortuitous to have been raised in a family of good cooks.  I didn't mention my mother above, since she and I didn't cook together much, but I'll get to that too, one day.  Growing up with people who are capable in the kitchen can give a person the sense of "I can do it."  I think if I had not been given the impression that cooking was a skill anyone could learn, I would have been less confident in trying, when my time came.

I'm very glad that I attempted that croquembouche. I'm even more delighted that I met my darling Hub and that he helped to bring out the natural cook inside me.  Cooking is a passion of mine, as much as eating is.  I can't imagine my life without the adventure of the kitchen or of eating new and exciting foods or better yet, learning to make them myself.

Making our own Limoncello