Food: The Cure.

Wende made a new game: Culinary Therapy. Week 1 directives are at the link. I'll cover breath/bones/heart later; here's the questionnaire.

Favorites (or not)

Is there a chef/cook, real or fictional, whom you admire? If so, what's the appeal of this person?

Hm. No. When you're talking the celebrity chef scene, I suspect one has to be a pretty serious foodie to be able to tell them all apart. Though watching old Julia Child shows during PBS pledge drives (they did this in Boston, since she was onWGBH first - they even replay the solicitation segments she filmed for them in the 60s) was always fun.

Is there a chef/cook, real or fictional, whom you find annoying? If so, what's the offense by this person?

I do find myself annoyed by Lidia Bastianich on PBS. It's just a personality thing.

Personal history

What's your earliest memory of cooking--or assisting with cooking--yourself?

I do remember cooking with my mother at a fairly young age - probably around 3. It was probably some form of baking, as that's really the only sort of cooking for which it isn't particularly hazardous to have a toddler standing on a chair next to you.

What do you consider to be comfort food?

I never know how to answer this question. I guess the right answer is most things tomato sauce-intensive. I also have a sweet tooth, which personally I see as a parallel issue.

What piece of cooking advice would you never take again?

"You should get your mother to teach you how to cook." This from my father, years ago, after several days of eating and genuinely complimenting my cooking. It wasn't a veiled hint that I needed help so much as a long-standing presumption that she has some sort of magical abilities to impart. She doesn't. She's a perfectly good cook, mostly by being organized and tidy and good at planning and following directions and having the good sense to not make bad recipes a second time. As a child I was even kind of smug that her homemade cookies came out round (not ugly and lumpy like the cookies made by those bad mothers...) and that she never did anything embarassing like use cheddar cheese in the lasagna for the church potluck.

But if I were to ask her to show me how to make Dish X from my childhood, the answer would always be, "Here's the recipe card." Which is totally fine with me - assuming I already know things like "How To Saute" (which I do) that's really all I need. She does have the advantage 25 years more experience than I have, but that falls into the category of "temporal reality" more than "transferrable skill."

Trying to be placatory, I did go ask her a bunch of questions that I legitimately had about various techniques ("what would you need to change to adapt a recipe for drop-cookies into one for shaped cookies?"), none of which she could answer, since I'm the one who thinks of things in terms of principles instead of procedure. Just a temperament difference.

(My father also asserts, "You should be good at cooking, because it's just like chemistry - you stir things together." It's not as though cooking is a mystery to him (though chemistry certainly is) - he's no gourmet, but could certainly provide himself with a generally appetizing and balanced diet if he bore responsibility for doing so.) (Obviously, real chemistry is relevant to some cooking - baking, mostly, and sauce-making, and some of the things people like to do to eggs - but if it were a prerequisite, most of us would have starved ages ago.)

What do you enjoy about cooking?

Being able to do it, if that makes sense. Also, it's good for me, because it tends to kill my appetite.

What do you dislike about cooking?

All the trouble and inconvenience of taking stuff out and doing stuff with it and cleaning it and putting it away. Especially the last two. Goodness, that doesn't sound spoiled-yuppie, does it?

What animal best summarizes your current cooking and/or eating habits?

Vulture. Not that I'm eating actual roadkill - I'm just eating whatever turns up.

Goals

What is bothering you about your current eating/cooking habits?

I'm being lazy, so feeding myself is just more expensive, inefficient and imbalanced than it ought to be. I could do worse, but I should do better.

What do you want to be able to say about your eating/cooking habits at the end of eight weeks?

She cooks. She eats. On purpose.

I think the key to getting there will be to re-discover the version of weeknight middle ground that works for me - I've somehow forgotten what comes between oatmeal for dinner and wild experimentation.

I'm at an advantage over some people who live alone in that I actually like eating the same thing several meals in a row. If it's something I particularly like, I'll very often crave it for several days after eating it - I've been known to make the same takeout order several times in a week - and there's no consistency as to what sort of dish triggers this reaction, so by indulging it I don't run the risk of eating nothing but pasta for a month (or, at least, no greater risk than would be presented by mere inertia). My efficient solution will doubtless harness this power, but I have to figure out how.

Ok. First a sandwich, then the library.