When I was a kid, I loved looking at cookbooks, & not just because I wanted to eat everything in those unreal, hyper-colored glossy photos that illustrated Betty Crocker volumes in the 1960s. No, I liked the recipes. They were like instructions for model planes - except you had to go get the ingredients, they (usually) didn't come in a package for you. When I was in eighth grade, they offered "Home Ec," which was supposed to be for girls. But I wanted to learn how to cook. I enjoyed the class. I thought I did all right.
Sadly, it didn't take. Probably because it was much easier to make something quickly - I still subsist mainly on sandwiches - than to take the time to make a meal for oneself. In that way, cooking was a lot like writing letters. I remember spending so much time writing letters to people back in the day, & then sending them off, & waiting for a response, & the response (if I got one) would be read in a fraction of the time it took me to write mine. Cooking is the same - I can labor in a kitchen for an hour, but the meal will be over in a quarter that time (the wife & I are fast eaters, & yes, we know it's unhealthy).
But finding oneself vegan in towns like Huntington & Lexington, one realizes that one ought to perhaps find a way to prepare one's own meals, since these cities are full of folks who've never heard the word "vegan" before, & who think of vegetarians as a kind of queer aberration. So one starts to prepare one's own meals.
At some point in the fall of 2009, we were living in Huntington, & I was very concerned about my wife. She didn't like her job, she didn't like the city, & she had the added responsibility of making food for her & me every night. In Austin, which we had just left, there were so many places we could go on those evenings where we were both too exhausted to try to cook. Not so hereabouts.
People are surprised when I tell them there's not a single vegetarian restaurant in Lexington. It's a college town, for fuck's sake! But there isn't one. There are places with vegetarian options, & even a couple that might make one or two dishes for vegans. The nice thing about your standard vegetarian place is that they usually can make most of their dishes vegan - but in restaurants that mainly serve dead animals, that's not an option they've even considered.
& while I appreciate that some places (not many but a handful) around here have a vegan option or two, there are a couple of reasons that I generally don't support the places that have the one vegan thing on the menu for people like me:
1) I don't know if I want to give my money to places that mainly, overwhelmingly, make their money selling dead animals. It just doesn't seem like patronizing these places ever makes them think about adding other vegan stuff to their repertoire.
2) I can cook better than pretty much all these places.
That has turned out to be a bad thing, me becoming a somewhat competent cook. My wife will tell me that she likes my food better than most of the stuff we can buy around town. But sometimes I would like a night off!
My kitchen is pretty simple, though. I try to keep it clean. I tend to rinse dishes off & put them in the dishwasher while I'm cooking, to avoid them piling up in the sink. & because the wife keeps the house pretty clean, the place usually doesn't smell like some houses do, like their kitchens, especially if the kitchen is mainly used to fry things. An aroma will fill the house after the meal, but the next day, it's just a memory.
This started with me thinking about cookbooks, & cookbooks are how I cook. It was only after a couple of years of following recipes that I made minor adjustments to them - & usually that was to add more vegetables. Recipes are my friends. I follow them slavishly. So the meals will always be as good as they were the first time. That's the trick, I think, to being a competent cook.
Although having a nice kitchen really does help.
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