TAKES NO SKILLET ALL

by Cynthia MacGregor


Do you have the skillet takes to be a good cook? The first thing required is patience—chopping up onions and garlic very finely, for instance, can be a real pan in the neck. The drudge work of cooking is hardly a-peeling. The mundane work can really a-salt you. Good cooking takes thyme. But I bay leaf the results are worth the effort. My neighbor thinks he can turn out fine food without using any herbs or spices. He claims friends come over to his house for dinner all the time, which he says proves he really can cook well. But I don’t curry really ought to know better.
There is a range of knowledge needed, but you don’t need to be a Cordon Bleu-trained chef; you can turn out a decent dinner with only half fridge skills. And nobody will pan your cooking. Creativity is very helpful for cooks, but following directions also plays an important pot.
It’s also valuable to use wine in many foods. A good wine is, “How come you never help with the cooking?!”
Last Thanksgiving I rosemary despite the work ahead, but when I opened my fridge I was brought back to reality. I never sausage a stuffed refrigerator. I had to cook almost all that stuff before my guests got here! Suddenly I felt bird under an avalanche of tasks! There were roast and roast of veggies in the fridge, and I yam not kidding when I tell you I had potatoes aplenty too. But the turkey would be the main event. Fortunately I’ve cooked enough of them over the years that I knew I could even do it in my sleep without gobbling the directions.
I rarely mess up when I cook, though one year I did fork get to serve the cranberry sauce. The bird was a knife, big, fresh turkey. It was a ladle bigger than we really needed, but leftovers work fine for me. When I saucer Tom sitting in the fridge, all majestic and fat, I wondered if my roasting pan was big enough, and I had to look cup in surprise that a fifteen-pound bird would be that wide.
I plate around with my stuffing recipe—it’s no fun cooking exactly the same thing every year. Experimentation is the fun pot of cooking. (So is eating the results—every Thanksgiving I stove myself even more than I stove the bird! But how oven do I cook a big meal like that?)
I have one perennial guest who is a highly critical diner, freezer Cordon Bleu graduate. But omelet you in on a secret: I ate at his house one night, and the food wasn’t that good! I’ll be much more relaxed the next time I know he’s cumin to see me. And I won’t let him egg me on.
If you have guests of that sort, washer step in the kitchen but don’t let them sink your aspirations. Most guests will be happy with any well-cooked food unless they burn their tongs, but there are a few guests who are always hard to please no matter how well you cook.
Try to have everything you need on hand in the way of both ingredients and equipment. You don’t want to have to run out to the store when you’re halfway into a recipe, nor do you want to have to run next door. You know…neither a borrower nor a blender be. If you don’t check first to make sure you have everything you need on hand, you’re taking a real whisk of not being ready to cook.
And that includes mundane equipment too. I had a friend who made sure she had all the ingredients, all the utensils…but she forgot she’d thrown out her old pot holders and hadn’t yet replaced them. She thought she could get by making do with a couple of kitchen towels instead, but she knew she would probably burner hands all the same, and she was right.
(cont'd tomw)