Call To Action
Posted by David | Filed under article
Ok, in order to get this blog started off right, I think we need to begin by issuing a call to action.
If you’re reading this site, it probably means one of two things: (1) you know one or both of us personally, find us both physically and mentally irresistible, and would therefore probably read any site that we started, be it for competitive yoga or minutia on historical tantric chant; or (2) you are interested in food and cooking. We’re going to assume that most of you are in the latter group, mainly for tax purposes.
Which leaves us with food. I like to think that we’re all food lovers here, and as such we should have some interest in spreading that excitement around a little.
So the assignment is simple: The next time you’re speaking with a friend, colleague, relative or love interest and they mention that they either don’t cook or don’t know how to cook, make it your mission to convince them otherwise. The reasons for doing this should be obvious, and here are a few:
- They’re lying
- Getting this person to cook more will make them healthier
- Trying to teach/instruct someone how to cook will make you a better cook
I’ll deal with each of these points in a second, but I thought of all this as I was recently writing a book review for a vegan cookbook. Now, I should explain that I’m not a vegan, but if you are I think it’s great. Personally I love butter and cheese (and honey) too much to make that jump, but every time I come across vegan fare I find a lot of the dishes both resourcefully inspiring and damn tasty looking.
The book is Great Chefs Cook Vegan, and you can find a full review of it here. It is a collection of mostly high-end vegan dishes prepared by some of the country’s (U.S.) most distinguished chefs. Names like Thomas Keller and Charlie Trotter are the first to come to mind. Many of the recipes in the book are fascinating, beautiful and intimidating. And I also think the book is a good example of why a lot of people don’t consider themselves cooks.
The recipes in Great Chefs Cook Vegan range from the basic – kababs – to things that you’re pretty sure you would never see in a restaurant unless you traveled to New York and dined in a place requiring expensive Italian shoes. But the vast majority of them lean towards things that, simple or not, many of us would consider “fancy” or “not something you would have everyday. “ And it’s fine to consider something that way, but as a wholesale idea it’s a shame, because a lot of the dishes are simple and could become an everyday item. We just don’t let them.
I think a lot of us – either due to our busy schedules or our restricted culinary upbringings – have a very small vocabulary for food. For example, we would consider homemade pizza standard fare and relatively easy, if not always quick. And that’s because we’ve allowed pizza to become a “staple” of our diet, something we’re comfortable with considering as standard food. But the curried cauliflower recipe from the vegan cookbook would be off our radar, and something we might consider but would put off for “a special occasion.” Why is that? The curried cauliflower would not only be a lot easier and quicker to make, but would certainly impress more people if you had them over for dinner.
Yet we’re stuck with our limited vocabulary of food that dictates what we’re capable of making. Anything outside of that vocabulary is considered fancy, exotic or time-consuming, even if it’s the simplest thing in the world to make (bruschetta, anyone?).
The first point from above highlights this, because if people say they can’t or don’t cook they’re lying. They cook all the time. If they can make a sandwich, they can cook. If they can make eggs and toast for breakfast, they can cook. Hell, if they can follow the instructions on most microwave dinners, I’ll still consider them a cook, because the start of any basic cooking is just following some simple instructions.
What they’re really saying is “yeah, but I don’t do ‘real’ cooking.” And as I’ve already illustrated, it’s just a matter of retooling their thinking a bit. Their definition of what constitutues “real” cooking is making the whole endeavor seem harder than it really is.
The second point is that it will make them healthier. Both Mark Bittman and Jamie Oliver seem to be making it their mission these days to inspire/teach people how to cook for themselves. And the health implications for this are beautifully basic: if you are in charge of making what you eat – as in from scratch, from real ingredients – then you tend to put better quality stuff in your mouth, and that is going to cause you to eat better. You’re not going to put junk in there, because most people are not going to go through the trouble to make junk. If you currently live on packaged foods, you might not even realize some of the stuff you’re putting in your body, and that’s the other side of it.
Trying to teach someone else how to cook will make you a better cook. Because my day job involves working with computers, it’s not uncommon for me to get questions from friends and family about how to do various things on their computers, on the web, on anything that plugs into a computer… actually, half of the questions are things that even I don’t know how to do, but usually with the help of Google, we can at least get them in the general direction of an answer. But even things that I think are basic, you have to be able to strip those ideas from their lingo and from your routine enough to communicate the basic idea to someone else who doesn’t deal with that on a daily basis.
That process, of deconstruction to its base and most simplistic steps, is hugely helpful even to you. It makes you stop and reconsider exactly why you do some of the things you do out of habit. Are those habits, under closer scrutiny, good practice? If so, perfect; keep doing them. If not, then figure out why not, and devise a better method.
I think of all of this as we’re starting up this site. Half of the impetus is for both Brent and I to become more proficient in the kitchen. So we’re just detailing some of the things we go through in the process. But the other half – and equally important, I think – is that education is a shared process. If we can throw out something every now and then that educates someone else, awesome. And likewise, when we screw up big time (and we will, just you wait) then I’m hopeful that someone else will point it out to us and we’ll learn something new so that we don’t keep doing that.
And in both respects, I hope we all help expand each other’s food vocabularies. After all, we’re just talking food here. At some point in history, someone had to be the first person to boil tea leaves and drink the by-product for breakfast. At first that idea was “fancy” and “exotic”, and I’m sure a lot of people who didn’t think it was crazy still probably thought it wasn’t something that they would try for everyday use. Same thing with coffee.
My, how time and experience changes our thinking.
When last we left you, I teased a new feature/series/focus for the website related to a new cookery book of almost mythic girth. A thousand-page testament to food on paper that we would not only use in exercise by simply picking up, but also something that we would be cooking from. And I’m here to tell you a little bit more about that.
