How many of you can cook?

I cook, and I do it very well...now. It has taken me years of practice with many failures before I found my "groove". Practice makes perfect. Don't give up, just give it time.

This southern girl has never ever had a mason jar of any kind of grease in her house including my childhood home. Not all southerners eat like that.

quote: BTW, am I the only one who keeps a mason jar of bacon grease in my fridge? I'm a "southern girl" but I only use it for chex mix.

Oh, I don't eat like that. I only make chex mix MAYBE twice a year, but bacon grease really is the way to go! It's the ONLY thing I use it for haha!

I cook and have considered going to culinary school! I think it came from growing up with a family that makes everything from scratch. My grandma always made food from scratch and my mom used to always make food from scratch until her work hours changed. Now I am the one making food from scratch when I'm not working. I think it just takes practice and concentration. Being able to multi-task and know when things are done with out getting out the thermometer or constantly having to check it. Going by smell or how it feels while stirring or flipping etc. Cooking is a lot of times called an art because you are creating something. So the more you can just go by feel, the better things might turn out! Now, that is easier said than done sometimes when trying to measure everything so you can track it, but you eventually know what a tablespoon looks like without measuring! And if you you don't measure something out perfectly, just track it as a little more, that way it seems like more calories even if it's not, and if it is more, then you already have it accounted for!

I come from a long line of cooks! I enjoyed it for years when my kids were still living at home. Now it's a 'once in a while' thing when my husband is home for a few days. (He is a long-distance truck driver.) Most days, I am also a master of the 'toss it in a pan and go' method!

Even if I do say so myself, I am a great chef (trained under some of the best chefs in Ireland so I should be). Just a shame it's hard to find a job at the moment.

Baking? Nope. No matter how hard I try, I can't even manage to make a simple sponge cake. But I can make cookies.

I'm an awesome cook - and I learned by making a lot of mistakes and still come out with duds 25 years later. You can start with simple recipes from a cookbook that'll have basics such as how to boil a potato. Then you'll have an idea of what temperature and how long to cook things. I started with steaks, then cooking chicken with bbq sauce, then ventured out by watching others and asking questions. One cousin pan cooked her chicken breasts and then added Italian dressing, sliced tomatoes, fresh basil leaves, then mozzarella. Delicious!

As opposed to simply 'preparing'.
I'm a master 'preparer'. I can throw a few ingredients together and make large, calorific, protein filled meals perfect for my goals in 20 minutes, tops. In fact, I don't think I've ever spent longer than that making my food.

BUT

I would like to break into actual cooking. I'd be nice to make a wider range of meals, more ingredients, more flavour and still hit my goals for each meal.

So my question, can you cook (well, not well)? Or do you just prepare food?

If you can cook, how did you pick it up, is it simply a matter of doing it over and over?
My mum's a chef so it'd a bit ridiculous that I fail at everything I make and it seems to take me AGES. Also I have no multi tasking skills so while the tomatoes are burning, I'm trying to flip a steak.

I'm a chef, classically trained in French. I come by it honestly through my grandmother from staying on their farm in the summers until my teens feeding my uncles. I did everything from curn cream into butter, make farmers cheese, gather eggs at 5:30 in the morning, pluck chickens and ducks, milk the cows.....plant vegetables, and everything was organic back then, even though it wasn't called that lol.

Cooking is pretty easy as soon as you understand the various cooking methods and the ingredient you want to use. If I could give any advice it would be to understand cooking method.....pick one, then do that over and over with various ingredients and soon, hopefully it will make more sense.

I can make everything from scratch, from bread to pizza dough to granola to ice cream. I don't, but I can.

In my opinion, the best meals are the simple ones with wholesome/healthy ingredients.

Last night, for example, I made my 6yr old daughter homemade chicken nuggets (chicken breast cut into bite sized peices, rolled in bread crumbs, and sauteed in pam with garlic and lemon), fresh steamed broccoli, sliced cucumber with homemade ranch dressing to dip it into and a cup of grapes.

A frittata is a healthy meal, egg whites+ 1 whole egg with feta cheese, black olives, onion, garlic - cooked until firm, with a side of Ezekial raisin toast. Simple, fast, and so very tasty!

I make pizza dough double recipe and freeze it in individual portion sizes. I freeze juice for dessert for my kids. I only buy processed foods when the product is as healthy as mine and to do it myself would take too long.

I love to cook and try new recipes. I usually adapt them to make them easier and to fit my dietary requirements at the time.

I don't cook at all - it just seems too time consuming and I don't have a great enough appreciation for food to want to put forth the effort. I helped a friend prepare for a dinner party once and everyone raved about the food - which was very good - but all I could think was, "that's a whole day of my life I'll never get back." My mom is a pretty good cook, but it always seemed like a chore versus something she enjoyed doing, so I was never interested in learning. Me and the microwave are besties though. It's a close and sacred bond.

This southern girl has never ever had a mason jar of any kind of grease in her house including my childhood home. Not all southerners eat like that.

quote: BTW, am I the only one who keeps a mason jar of bacon grease in my fridge? I'm a "southern girl" but I only use it for chex mix.

[/quote]

I'm guilty of having the jar of bacon grease in the fridge. It's necessary for a good batch of cornbread (you need something to grease the iron skillet, right?) :laugh:

I cook...and plan the meals and buy the ingredients.
I watched a huge amount of cooking shows (I prefer visual learning) to get ideas and then went for it. Coming from an Italian family on one side and German on the other I think I do have some of the good cooking genes!
The one thing that improved my cooking greatly is learning about spice and herb flavors. Once I got a good handle on that now I rarely use a recipe, although I do write down what I did only to figure out the nutritional info.
Because I don't like to follow recipes I'm a horrible baker (although in my 20s I worked in a bakery as a baker, before I developed a love of cooking).
Don't be afraid to experiment!!!

I am happy to say that I can cook. And after reading your post I came up with a couple ideas that I hope help you out.

1) Take it slow to start. Rushing into a complex meal right from the get go will leave you with some burned food or undercooked food while you are trying to manage everything at once. Find a couple recipes that will not require you to watch too many things at one time.

2) Balance what you are cooking. When you say that you trying to cook tomatoes and at the same time not burn a steak, it sounds to me like you may want to hold back more on the cooking of the tomatoes until you are nearly finished with cooking the steak. When you are cooking something delicate it is usually best to cook it alternatively to something that is going to take a lot of heat and a longer time before it is finished. If your mom is a chef she'd be the first to tell you that she isn't the one watching both of those foods at the same time, she would be focusing on one while the sous chef would be attending to the other. Of course, being that most of us either a) don't have a sous chef to assist or b) have a kitchen big enough to allow 2 people to each handle part of the stove we gotta find a good balance.

Usually I will cook the steak until it is nearly ready, and then wrap it up in foil along with as much of the juices as I can capture to keep it moist and let the heat from the cooked meat keep it warm while handling the more delicate foods next. (If it looks like it will end up getting cold even in foil then I will put it back in the oven for a couple minutes in the foil and allow it just to heat up... (yeah you can use a microwave, but it usually doesn't do the food justice... watch a couple episodes of "Kitchen Nightmares" and you'll see that the best chefs can always identify when a food has been heated in an oven or in a microwave).

3) Find a couple meals that you really like and work at them until you feel that it is perfect. Do yourself a favor and get a bunch of different spices, and read up on them, find out what each one does and how it can affect a meal. I have a ton of spices in my house and as a rule I try to use what I can but I do my best not to go over 5 different spices for any one dish.... too much spice muddles the flavor, and too little will make it bland. Also taste everything as you are cooking, the more you work with it you'll find what spices compliment what you are making and you will be able to know how much to add to make it taste the way you want.

My final recommendation is that you should work at one meal at a time when buying food for cooking more elaborate meals. For example, I have a vegetarian lasagne that I cook without any noodles... it is layered veggies, sauce and cheeses. I will not buy the veggies until the day I am preparing the meal only because I want the freshest I can find, and it makes all the difference in the world. When I am making any kind of meat, steak, burgers, etc... again I only buy the same day I am plan to use it, freezing meat hurts the flavor, but when you get it fresh it always turns out much better.

Good luck with your progress!!

I can cook tonight it is grilled pork tenderloins with vegetable kabobs with a fruit smoothie. Tenderloins and vegetables loaded with spices. Should be good but would probably be better if I were drunk I seem to make some really good off the wall dishes after drinking all day

This southern girl has never ever had a mason jar of any kind of grease in her house including my childhood home. Not all southerners eat like that.

quote: BTW, am I the only one who keeps a mason jar of bacon grease in my fridge? I'm a "southern girl" but I only use it for chex mix.

Oh, I don't eat like that. I only make chex mix MAYBE twice a year, but bacon grease really is the way to go! It's the ONLY thing I use it for haha!

Oh but a little bit of bacon grease to use for sautee greens or beans is very tasty, and really not to bad for you.

I love to cook but don't ask me for a recepie, things rarely taste exactly the same way twice in my house!

I think alot of it is trial and error, when I was younger I used to make different dishes that I found in magazines and cookbooks. Then after a while I started to get a bit more creative and subsituting or adding stuff in. Now I just throw stuff together without measuring or writing it down - which can be a drawback if you really liked something!!

Good luck!

we must be twins