When I bought my house five years ago I was overcome with a wave of domesticity that manifested itself in the purchase of design magazines and painting the rooms a variety of colors with silly names (“Spring Sprout” and “Madder Carmine”), most of which I do not regret. One issue of House & Garden had a recipe for smoked salmon scrambled eggs in popovers, which sounded like just the thing for my housewarming brunch and inspired me to try my hand at the culinary arts. I soon became hooked, realizing that cooking combined two of my greatest passions: magazines and gadgets. (For instance, I own a potato ricer, which I have used exactly once.) Then Mom gave me a copy of The Joy of Cooking for Christmas, which can only be described as Essential. (In the peculiar ways of our family, this book is referred to as “Mrs. Rombauer’s.”) I taught myself to cook by picking a different recipe every day, shopping for it, and cooking it. I’ve tried a lot of different things in the last five years with varying degrees of success and have attained a modest degree of proficiency which at the very least keeps me from being too nervous about cooking for guests (although I do reach a level of tension while I’m preparing a big meal which sometimes means I’m less than hospitable to people who want to hang around in the kitchen and talk to me while I’m cooking. But I’m working on it.)
My mother is an excellent cook, and my interest has given us something enjoyable to share. I often call her to ask cooking questions, usually while I’m wearing hot mitts and worrying that I’ve destroyed something or created something toxic. (At least I’m past the “is this mayonnaise too old to eat” stage.) Our mutual interest is especially fun around the holidays, when we bond furiously in the kitchen.
I pride myself on two things: green beans and mashed potatoes. I’ve perfected my green bean technique after many years of trial and error, along with a ridiculous level of persnicketiness reached after reading too many books about the Culinary Institute of America. I won’t reveal all my tricks, but just to give you an idea, a sinkful of ice water is involved.
As for the mash, I’ve learned the secret: tremendous – nay, deadly – amounts of butter and cream and salt. With this you cannot go wrong. Today, however, it all went pear-shaped. I peeled half a bag of Yukon Gold potatoes and boiled them for twenty minutes. I melted two sticks of butter with some cream and salt and pepper, ready to add to the potatoes. I remember thinking to myself, “I need to add this a little bit at a time.” Any cook will understand my mindset when everything suddenly became ready all at once: the lamb, the green beans and the potatoes. So instead of adding the butter/cream mixture a little bit at a time, I panicked and dumped it all in at once. The result was potato cream butter soup. In an effort to help me salvage this glutinous mess, Mom suggested adding some potato flakes, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea. I grabbed the box and dumped about a cup into the bowl. “That’s rice,” Mom calmly explained. No amount of tasting and retasting and self-denial were able to convince us that Dave’s Potato Rice Casserole was a discovery as opposed to a catastrophe. Three pounds of potatoes and half a pound of butter went down the drain, and I started over. Luckily Dad was napping and never knew what transpired.
All things considered, it could have been much worse. Like, say, for instance, my first Christmas dinner when my family each consumed roughly a half-ounce of melted plastic. But let’s not dwell on that. We all survived.
