I Think, Therefore I Nom

Welcome. If you've stumbled across my little blog, it means that I've either shoved it in your face and said, "LOOK AT MY BLOG!" or you're a genuinely curious stranger with a shared passion for eating. In that case, double welcome for not being threatened. You seem normal. Please stay. Have you tried the bean dip?

Let's get started.

For as long as I can remember, I have been one of two things: a fat chick and an alien in the kitchen. How can this be? Well, it's quite simple. You see, I grew up with two culinary professionals as parents. They owned a bakery for a number of years, peddling my mother's famous rugelach. After they sold the bakery, over the years Dad worked for several giant food corporations that included Drake's Cakes, Manhattan Bagel and Villa Pizza. He passed away suddenly in 2008. After teaching aerobics for some time, Mom owned and operated and cooked for her own vegetarian restaurant for nine years before working as a culinary instructor. She is now a paralegal.

Now, when you grow up with chefs for parents (or parents for chefs), you become their guinea pig. Almost every time you walk into the kitchen, you're being handed a spoon or a fork and ordered to "taste this." Dinner was not just dinner, it was a foodie's delight! Childhood friends begged dinner invitations! In our garage was a freezer full of delicious experimental goodies - everything from mini chocolate eclairs to shredded pork in barbecue sauce. It was no shock when by high school I was a size 14! My father used to say he sacrificed his body for his art - I think mine was sacrificed for his art, too!

Another pitfall of having chefs for parents is you become utterly useless in the kitchen. Well, you do if you're a lazy ass like me. Whenever my mom would try to show me something, I would always shrug it off or laugh and say, "No use in me learning this stuff now! Not when I always have YOU to cook for me!"

Oh, how wrong I was.

In early 2010, at the ripe old age of 22, I was a year into a relationship with my current fiance and facing a very scary thing: moving out on my own. I had a mild panic attack, sure - because I was going to be expected to cook.

Game over. No more Mommy in the kitchen. No more coming home to a hot meal. No more fancy-pants dinners. Surely, I would starve to death.

So, I started, tentatively,  to venture into the kitchen. It was very tentative. I scoured the interwebz for easy recipes. I refused to touch any recipe that involved roasting, grilling or sauteing. I would not consider working with any main ingredients other than pasta or chicken (it would be seven months before I attempted to roast a pork loin).

My God, I thought, I'm never coming out of this alive. I'm doomed to spend the rest of my life eating instant mac and cheese and Lean Cuisine!

But, like the light at the end of the tunnel, I faced my fear in September 2010. I moved in with the boyfriend and became...a decent cook.

It was rough at first. The first few weeks we were living together, simplistic recipes ruled the roost. I made pasta and sauce. I made chicken marinated in lemon pepper. I made meat loaf. Once we got a little crazy and made steak stir-fry, using pre-sliced pieces of steak from Shop Rite. I still didn't want to try anything too complicated or convoluted. Recipes with too many steps made my head spin. I decided, finally, that enough was enough. I needed to man up. I found a recipe book: Cook This, Not That, by those geniuses David Zinczenko and Matt Goulding.

Their introduction was soothing, like a mother's touch or sinking into a warm, hot bath:

"Come with us to a magical place. It's a place of comfort and ease, a place where you're in control and no one can tell you what to do. It's a place where you can be as inventive, creative, and wacky as you want, and everything you do is perfectly alright. And best of all, it's a place where you can eat all your favorite foods and still lose all the weight you want. Indeed, this place is so magical, you can not only lose weight and eat great but also grow wealthier and healthier, just by spending more time there. So, what is this magic place? It's your kitchen."

Suddenly, it all came clear. They understood me. They didn't want me to be afraid of the kitchen, they wanted me to love it. I wanted to take this book, crawl into bed with it, and die there. I had found my bible.

Slowly but surely, I came out of my culinary shell. I quickly realized, as I skimmed through the delicious recipes in this mystical tome, that I had been aiming high. So what if I can't whip up a brisket or roast a turkey right out of the gate? So what if the thought of cooking fish makes me frozen with fear? SO WHAT?! I'll tell you what! I AM GOING TO BE THE BEST DAMN COOK THAT I CAN! AND AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, I'LL NEVER BE HUNGRY AGAIN!!!

*ahem*

Thanks to that one book, I became a cooking machine. I was on the internet every day looking for bigger and better recipes with more varied tastes. I placed phone calls to my mother about the best cuts of meat for a French pot roast and what's a fair price for a pound of catfish? One night, my fiance and I made a trip to the 24 hour Wal-Mart because we decided, at 10pm, that we needed a blender right stat now. With that blender I began to make my own pesto and my own guacamole  (not to mention learning how to make my own tortilla chips to dip into my own guacamole). When my fiance's sister gave us a crock pot for Hanukkah this year, I nearly sobbed with joy. The slow cooker dinners are churned out at least once a week now.

As recently as yesterday, my dearest friend suggested that I start a blog. What would I write about? I asked her. She threw out a few suggestions, which were good, but deep down, I knew that the only thing I could write about would be the one thing that I love more than anything: food.

It reminds me of the film Julie & Julia:

Paul and Julia Child, played exquisitely by Stanley Tucci and Meryl Streep respectively, are sitting in a little Parisian cafe. Julia does not want to be a bored housewife and declares that she must find something to do. Paul asks her what she likes to do. Her response: "Eat!" I think we all know what that lead to for Mrs. Child.

Whether or not this exchange actually happened, I don't know and I don't care. But I'm unemployed and bored, and I love to eat. So, like Julia Child, I'm turning that into something. This is my blog: Cogito Ergo Nom ("I think, therefore I nom", taken from the phrase coined by Jeph Jaques, artist and author of Questionable Content). At least three nights a week, I vow that I am going to come on here to recount my culinary adventures, both good and bad, successes and failures. I will include pictures. My goal is to show those who are "culinary challenged" (and myself) that no matter how old you are or what your level of experience is, the kitchen is, in fact, your friend!

Tomorrow night: chicken fried rice!