The Joy of Cooking
Since I’ve been staying home and being Mr. Mom, I’ve had to do a bit more of the cooking. Cooking, to me, is like singing or dancing.
I love to sing, but I’m pretty much completely tone deaf. Really, when people talk about the key of C or the key of G, I have no idea what they are talking about. It’s like trying to explain color to a blind man. Nonetheless, I sing to myself as I walk down the street, I sing in the shower, and I love karaoke with a passion.
I’ve got a fairly deep voice, I love being on stage and I can get really, really loud when I want to.
I love to dance, but I step on people’s feet a lot and have been known, on occasion, to fall over. Doesn’t matter. If there’s a chance to get on the dance floor, I’m there.
Likewise with cooking. I’m not a great cook. I ignore recipes or make substitutions and adjustments according to taste quite liberally. I sometimes forget what I’m doing and leave out key ingredients, or get too stoned and let things burn. Nonetheless, I enjoy it, I do my best and the result is almost always edible and occasionally, on a lucky day, excellent.
The problem is, my family and I don’t like the same things. I like spicy food. My wife, being Czech, does not. If you sprinkle a little bit of pepper on top, that counts as spicy here. Even the Chinese and Thai restaurants serve food significantly less spicy than they would anywhere else in the world. My kids aren’t mad about spicy food either, but they are young. There is hope.
Also, I love mushrooms and I’m the only one in the family who does. That is a shame, because this is a wonderful country for mushrooms. In America, you usually get just one variety in the stores, the kind known here as champignons. Here, you usually have a choice of two or three. As a child in Iowa, we often went out hunting mushrooms, but we were looking specifically for morels. Here, when people go out hunting mushrooms, there are numerous varieties that they will pick.
So, I concentrate on the things that everybody likes and try to limit my experimentation, but not too much. After all, you never know when I will create a masterpiece.
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