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Some people say where there's smoke, there's fire. In my house, where there's smoke, there's dinner. Try as I might, the most basic kitchen skills elude me. Even the vocabulary's confusing. "Blanch" and "julienne" are potential names for my children, not something I'd do to potatoes. A "colander" is where I pencil in my upcoming dinner dates (at restaurants, of course). A "wok" is what I take after I've eaten too much. And "blackened" chicken? That's for novices. I can blacken hot dogs, green beans, and cream-based soups without ever reaching for the fire extinguisher.
It doesn't help that I married into a family that would make Emeril envious. Taking basic ingredients and turning them into fancy French dishes such as coq au vin or vichyssoise comes as easily as breathing for my sisters-in-law. And my mother-in-law can whip up a meal comparable to what's served at any five-star restaurant without batting a spatula. Just the thought of attempting such a feat makes me need to breathe into a brown paper bag. It's intimidating, to say the least.
Early in my marriage, I decided to swallow my pride and ask my mother-in-law for some help. "I'm supposed to fix something for an office party," I told her. "Do you know of anything I can make that doesn't require me to boil, baste, broil, bake, or fry?"
"I've got an easy recipe for a congealed salad," she suggested. "Why don't you try that?"
Congealed salad. Now that sounded like a happy, non-threatening thing to make ("This year's Ms. Congealed Salad winner is … "). So pulling out pretzels, Jell-O, cream cheese, and a variety of other ingredients, I followed the recipe to a T, which apparently stood for trouble.
See, I have a fundamental problem with recipes. As a lawyer friend of mine likes to say, they assume facts not already in evidence. With the congealed salad, somehow I was supposed to know intuitively I should spread the cream cheese completely across the pretzels and seal off the edges before I poured the Jell-O over it. Lacking that one vital piece of information, my congealed salad quickly became Jell-O soup, and my congeniality waned.
Other recipes are just as vague. For example, while laboring over an intricate pasta dish—okay, I was boiling spaghetti—I came across the instructions "cook al dente." Just who is Al Dente? And why should I be cooking for him? As a studious former English major, I looked up the phrase. In its original Italian form, it means "to the tooth." I guess that means I'm supposed to cook my pasta so it won't break the teeth of those who eat it. If that's the case, then maybe I should hang a picture of good old Al prominently in my kitchen as a reminder of my main goal in cooking.
Because of incidents like this, I've come up with what I like to call my Irrefutable Recipe Rules. First, all ingredients must be able to be pronounced by anyone with a decent phonics background. Second, the number of ingredients called for can't outnumber my children or the square root of the number of Pampered Chef gadgets I currently own—whichever is less. Third, if the recipe calls for something to be parboiled, nix it. (Just exactly what is parboiling anyway? The word itself sounds inedible.) And here's one last rule of thumb: "Season to taste" means whoever wrote the recipe didn't know how to fix it. Therefore it stands to reason it's not going to taste right when I make it.
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