'If I could learn to cook for my partner during a pandemic, anyone can'
A year ago, in the darkest days of the pandemic, this was one of our routines: Nell, my partner, would make us dinner and we would eat it together while watching "Alone," the wilderness survival show where contestants are deposited in the backwoods to match wits with nature while trying to stave off hunger, loneliness and the elements. Occasionally they do cool/gross things like peel back the cheek skin of a dead wild musk ox and say, "We got to render the tallow out of this face gristle." Nell and I would marvel at their resourcefulness. Then she would go to bed and I would do the dishes and scrub the pots and pans.
Nell had started to really enjoy cooking, and she was good at it. She'd make spicy white bean stew with kale, mushroom bourguignon, pecorino-and-leek risotto. When we moved in together last year, she took charge in the kitchen most evenings and I would clean up afterward. I had just enough in my repertoire (eggs, basic sandwiches, Caprese salad if I was trying to be fancy) to handle my end of breakfast and lunch duties. But on nights when dinner fell to me, I would usually order delivery. Or I'd make pasta with red sauce from a jar, which was functional but deeply unexciting.
But as we approached another pandemic winter, where dinner was one of the few opportunities to distinguish one day from the next, I decided it was time for me to step it up. To cultivate some resourcefulness of my own, for both our sakes. If Roland from Alaska could render tallow from an ox's face, then I should probably know how to steam a vegetable. Right?
And so, somewhat late in life's journey, I found myself in a bright kitchen.
First recipe: Crispy Chickpeas with Fried Shallots and Coriander-Mint Chutney.
I chopped up a shallot per the recipe, along with an onion I'd bought because I'd just learned what shallots were a half-hour earlier and I didn't trust them yet.
"In a skillet over medium heat, heat 1/2 cup of the oil until shimmering." And what if the oil is not so much shimmering but rather smoking as if it's on fire, or possibly haunted? In with the chickpeas. Out with dozens of tiny drops of oil, stinging like insects.
I don't have a lot of strong opinions about kitchen appliances, but here's one: The food processor is not appropriately named. It is the most violent machine in the kitchen other than the garbage disposal. It doesn't "process" foods; it explodes them with knives while screeching. "Food processor" sounds like newspeak concocted by a sinister culinary regime to reassure the international community.
Anyway, I measured mint and coriander and yoghurt and garlic powder and lime juice and raisins and olive oil into the Food Destroyer and pressed the destroy the foods button.
Everything looks better on a bed of rice, so I made up two for the chickpeas and chutney to rest on. And everything looks better with little shreds of green garnish on top, so I chopped up some more mint and coriander leaves and sprinkled it.
What I'm saying is that the Crispy Chickpeas with Fried Shallots and Coriander-Mint Chutney a la me looked like an actual dish of food. This was an accomplishment on its own, and I decided to start bragging before trying it in case it tasted bad. I sent photos to a group chat with some former roommates as if to say: "Remember in college how I would sometimes, for a meal, eat a block of Cabot cheese? Now check me out!"
I had barred Nell from the kitchen in a hyperbolic attempt to preserve the mystery of what I was making, while also giving away the game by sending nervous texts about whether raisins are OK to put in the Food Destroyer.
She was a great sport, very supportive and amused by the whole thing. Like my former roommates on the group chat, Nell knew way too much about just how little I knew about preparing food.
She knew that back when the virus closed most restaurants, I was living in a solo apartment with no oven pans, no mixing bowls, no measuring cups, no cutting boards or cutting knives.
She remembered trying to make pizza at my place with a pizza stone I impulse-bought, except I didn't own oven mitts, and so we used a flannel trapper hat, which turned out to be made of synthetic material, which melted.
And so she understood that the real mystery now was not which recipe I'd tried to make but whether it would taste anything like it was supposed to.
It tasted like creamy and minty and limey and - hallelujah! - generally delicious.
Could cooking be . . . easy? Or, at least, not hard? Not hard enough that I couldn't screw it up as long as I followed the recipe?
The only way to find out was to make more things.
Next up: Chilli Lime Black Bean Tacos.
I'm a vegetarian now, but when I was a kid, homemade tacos meant hamburger meat, cheddar cheese, salsa and sour cream wedged into a corn tortilla that exploded the moment it touched your teeth. Each ingredient was as compartmentalized in the taco as it had been in the fridge.
The chili lime black bean taco recipe called for something a little less Lunchables than that. It instructed me to spoon Dijon mustard into a saucy mixture that also included black beans, cumin, paprika and chili powder. This was the mortar with which I would entomb the memories of my taco past and pour the foundation for my taco future.
The recipe also instructed me to chop up an onion, soak the onion bits in a bath of hot water and squeeze them.
Ostensibly this was to keep the onions from giving us onion breath. This sounded like a superstition, like how rural villagers used to "tell the bees" about deaths in the household to ward off colony collapse. Or maybe it was some sort of Andy Kaufman-like prank; I imagined the recipe authors chuckling at the thought of thousands of clueless cooking novices standing over their sinks, squeezing wet onions in their stupid fists for no reason.
But cooking requires trust and vulnerability, so I gave the onions an earnest squeeze.
Speaking of vulnerability: My first injury came on my third cooking attempt, when I made a noodle dish called Sticky Hoisin Broccoli With Almonds.
The recipe called for orange zest. This was exciting because "zest" is a word I loved as a kid, and zesting an orange felt like answering the call of a destiny long forgotten.
Alas, the orange rotated as I drew it across the grater, causing me to zest my thumb instead.
The wound - mercifully shallow, surprisingly bloody - was instantly caked with citrus. It stung in more ways than one. I thought it would be the shallots, those shady onion cousins, that would betray me. But no, it was the trusty orange, an ally since youth soccer.
No time to learn any lessons, though, because a big part of cooking is trying to keep track of a bunch of things at once.
I already knew this at some level, having watched many times the scene in "Goodfellas" where Ray Liotta's character tries to make ziti with meat gravy and fried cutlets while also doing a series of errands/felonies. My juggling act was simpler than that (no crimes), but still, I came away appreciating the benefits of choreographing the process ahead of time.
For example, you don't want to get so distracted measuring six different liquids and powders into a mixing bowl that you accidentally leave the broccoli florets on the stovetop so long that they begin to look like Ursula the Sea Witch's garden of poor unfortunate souls.
It was a close call, but once again, I failed to screw things up too badly. The broccoli wasn't too burned and the noodles turned out really tasty. The orange/thumb zest blended sweetly with the honey and ginger, which mixed with the hoisin and soy sauces to give the noodles a sweet-salty tang.
Weeks passed, and the rhythms of recipe-following grew more familiar. I learned that "julienning" a vegetable means cutting it into little matchsticks. I learned how you're supposed to slice up a butternut squash (forcefully, while bracing for disaster). I learned that not all stovetops are calibrated the same, and that one burner's "medium heat" is another burner's "surface of the sun." I made Spicy Peanut Soba Noodles with Green Beans. I made Chickpea Curry.
Did I make that extremely photogenic Baked Feta Pasta that went viral on TikTok? Yeah, I made the internet pasta. It was fatty and rich and yet not totally devoid of protein, kind of like the internet. The difference is that the pasta you take is equal to the pasta you make, whereas the internet is a bottomless trough. If I gorged myself on internet pasta the way I gorge myself on the internet, I'd be in the hospital.
There's probably a lesson in there somewhere, but let's move on to another popular recipe: that Greek lentil soup that everyone made in 2020.
The story behind the soup reads like a rejected line from Paul Simon's "Graceland." There's a man in Seattle, Washington, who's eaten the same soup lunch for 17 years. And what's that? The man got the recipe from a woman named Crescent Dragonwagon? On the intangibles alone, I was sold. In terms of ingredients, this soup was simply loaded. Jalapeño pepper! Potatoes! Butternut squash! Celery! Onion! Garlic! Spinach! Lemons! And, of course, lentils.
How many lentils? Good question. Very, very good question.
It turns out I have zero aptitude for the grocery-aisle carnival game that is guessing how many grams of lentils I have just pulled into a bag at the bulk-foods fountain. Suffice to say that because of bad intuition, I bought about three times as many lentils as I needed (one pound). Even after recognising my mistake, I still managed to put about twice as many lentils into the soup pot as I was supposed to. This became clear after about 20 minutes, when it came time to dump the chunks of potatoes and squash and veggies into a broth-and-lentil brew that was supposed to be mostly liquid. It would have been like dumping a pallet of luggage onto muddy cobblestones.
I didn't know what an Actual Cook would do in this situation. My solution was first to panic, and then to start bailing water into the pot. Then I realised that all that extra water was probably diluting the flavour of the soup. So I started throwing a bunch of coriander and cumin in after it, all the while muttering "Oh, boy" under my breath in a way that made Nell keep asking if I needed any help. I made no measurements - just relied on that super keen intuition we discussed earlier. Something I've learned from cooking is that I would make a terrible astronaut.
Luckily, soup is more forgiving than space. If the flavour is out of whack, you can add more salt. Or pepper. Or lemon juice. Or cumin. The fundamental ingredients are what they are, and the balance of spices can be tinkered with even after everything is settled.
If you're not the cook in your household and are interested in trying, but are also pretty sure you'll be bad at it, understand that you don't have to get deep into food chemistry or strive for invention. You really just have to follow instructions, and a good recipe makes those pretty easy for you. And if things go awry and you have to improvise a bit? Enjoy the rush, because nothing exciting ever happens on the dishwashing side of things.
As for me and Nell, our routines this pandemic winter have been similar to the last one, but also different. Sometimes she cooks, sometimes I do. I've been making sticky hoisin noodles a lot. It's well on its way to becoming a staple. She's been making this really tasty spaghetti with tomatoes and kalamata olives and capers and breadcrumbs. We finished "Alone" a long time ago. Lately, we've been watching "Station Eleven." It's also a show about survival, except in this one, the people are trying to figure out how to do it together.
The Washington Post
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