Cooking Up Steam

Describe your cooking skills as a young person.  How did you learn to cook?

Thanks to the journal jar for this bubbling subject.

Seems to me I've blogged about this before already.  I'll have to get back to you on that.

I learned to cook mostly from my mother, who included me and allowed me to help her while she was cooking.  I would chop the vegetables, measure out spices, stir the sauces... just do the stuff that you have to do to cook, but just not be responsible for it all.  It's empowering to pitch in and help and end up earning some credit for a meal because you helped.  It's another thing to be the one in charge of the cooking.

A quick search of the blog provided this previous visit to the journal jar-- check it out here.  It reminds me of another aspect of cooking that I learned, but this time from my dad.  He taught me the art of BBQ.  And what an art that is.

But the real "formative" training in cooking was received in the 3rd grade, when our babysitter Sally Singleton came to the classroom and took a group of kids to the school cafeteria to cook a recipe.  Each week she took a group of kids and taught them a recipe, and then we eventually all made cookbooks for our mothers for Mother's Day with all of the recipes.  I bet my mom still has that recipe book somewhere, all covered in grease splatters from my repeated renditions of Waikiki Meatballs and Stir-Fry Vegetables.

I think I really learned to cook when I went away to college and started living on my own.  That's when I had to get creative and learn to cook with what I had.  Some of the stuff I did was delicious, other stuff not so good.  But I experimented and started to put meals together and balance tastes with textures.  And I started pairing things with wines, too.  All this made for more interesting dishes.  I once made dinner for my parents when I was home from college.  My friend Pete had helped me pick out some wine to cook with and serve with the meal.  The meal kind of amounted to a chicken stir-fry with vegetables-- snowpeas, to be sure-- but it fit the bill.  It was a success, and my mom remarked, and I remember, that I had "become quite the cook."  She may be a bit biased.

What Is Special About Learning

Gonna have to keep after it, this jar of journal, if I am to finish by year's end.  So.  Onward.

What special skills did you learn as a child?  Who taught you?

Nothing immediately jumps to mind on those questions.  I could talk about reading, but I've already blogged about that here.  And I wouldn't classify that as a special skill, necessarily.  I mean, reading is widely taught to almost all individuals throughout the world.  Getting at a more specialized skill that I learned is going to be difficult.

And don't misunderstand me-- I believe reading is a very special skill that is so very important.  But my feeling here is to try and focus on a skill or skills that were unique to my experience.  That's how I'm interpreting the word special, in this case, anyway.

For some reason one of the first things I thought of was fishing with my dad.  He taught me how to bait a hook, cast the line, "troll", and even clean fish.  Not everybody knows how to do such things.  In fact, I know people who shy away from such things, are squeamish of cleaning fish.  I guess I can understand that, but it's something I think one can overcome with a little care and patience.

We used to fish off the bank of the lake at Lake Shasta, back when we had a cabin up there.  Some years the drought was such that there wasn't any water in the part of the lake closest to our cabin.  But other years were better.  There was one day that we fished out there about the entire day.  I think that was the time that I ended up with about forty mosquito bites around my neck and shoulders, as we fished into the evening and as the sun went down, the bugs came out in full force.  And I was wearing a tank-top, so a lot of skin was exposed.  Very itchy.

Let's see.  I learned how to ride a bike... how to do yardwork... how to fire a rifle... Still, I just am not coming up with something that satisfies my feeling for the unique, special skill that I'm looking for here.  I learned things when I went to YMCA camps-- that's where I fired the .22 rifle.  I learned arts and crafts there too, carving a little something out of a piece of sandstone, weaving vinyl strands into a lanyard/key chain... making "godseyes" out of yarn and popsicle sticks... I learned to cook fairly early in my childhood, cooking with my mom and in the 3rd grade, when my babysitter took a group of kids out of the classroom and cooked each week in the school cafeteria.  We then made up recipe books for Mother's Day out of all the recipes we had done.

I learned a lot about tools and craftsmanship from my dad.  Dad had a lot of tools and was very crafty and industrious, designing and building things all the time.  From him I learned about channel locks, socket sets (both metric and standard), vise grips and other pliers, wire cutters, soldering irons, measuring squares, drills, saws, hammers, screwdrivers, allen wrenches, tin snips, electricity meters, stud finders, mollies, woodscrews, finishing nails, and many other special things.  I learned to have an attention for details and safety when dealing with such things.  I learned to respect tools and take care of them.  Although I don't think I ever did as good a job of it as Dad did.

I guess I could say that I learned a lot of special skills from my mom and dad that I use to this day and into the future.  Thanks for all that, mom and dad.  You guys rock.