School for cooks

 

Note: Posts in this blog originally appeared in my column, Amuse-bouche, in the Napa Valley Register. this one is from March 2008.

 

Like most girls in the pre-feminist era, I was required to take Home Ec in eighth grade, to learn the housewifely skills of sewing and cooking. The only thing I remember learning, however, was how to boil water — although they called it chicken-noodle soup. We used dried Lipton Soup mix. (No joke, they actually taught this in school.) My first attempt wasn’t very successful — I was busy gossiping in the back of the room and forgot to put the noodles into the water on time, so they were just a little crunchy. But I studied hard and eventually I got the hang of it.

Needless to say, I graduated from the class fully prepared to run as far away as possible from the stove.

My mother didn’t help. She was an excellent cook, but not much of a teacher — her main interest was in getting dinner to the table on time. I think her most frequent instruction to me was “Get out of my kitchen, you’re in the way.”

Occasionally, she’d call us in when she needed an extra pair of hands to help with baking cookies or rolling meatballs. But I didn’t really cook until I was in college.

My sophomore year, a group of us shared an apartment-style dorm suite, one that came complete with a kitchen. After barely surviving a freshman year of inedible meal plan food, it was heaven to be in control of our own diet.

Thanks to Debby, our hyper-organized, extremely obsessive roommate, who herded us all into it, the four of us set up a dinner cooperative. We pooled money for groceries and shopped once a week, then each of us was responsible for one meal, Monday through Thursday. It was truly the blind leading the blind, as at first none of us knew how to prepare more than one or two simple dishes.

I gravitated toward “ethnic” food, so my specialty was vaguely (very vaguely!) Chinese: stir-fried beef with peppers and tomatoes. Other standbys included broiled chicken, hamburgers and spaghetti. A big splurge was a package of Uncle Ben’s Long Grain and Wild Rice. For potluck dinners, we relied on my skill at boiling water — we made Kraft Mac ’n’ Cheese (the kind where you cooked the macaroni and added gooey cheese from a little can inside the package), earning us an entirely unmerited reputation among our male friends for being fabulous cooks.

Debby had a small step up on the rest of us, as she had actually spent the previous summer working as a cook for some wealthy people at their beach house. This did not signal that she knew how to cook, however — just that she had enormous chutzpah. She’d gotten the job by lying through her teeth (she wanted to spend the summer at the beach) and she managed to bully the family and their guests into eating only dishes that she could look up in the Joy of Cooking, her only cookbook. She couldn’t flip fried eggs over without breaking them, so she made up a check-off menu for them to order breakfast, and only offered eggs scrambled or sunny side up. Problem solved.

From her, I learned that confidence goes a long way in the kitchen. And if you can read and follow directions, you can make pretty much anything — though how it tastes depends on if you’ve picked a good recipe in the first place.

From Margo, I learned to appreciate my mother’s insistence on fresh ingredients. Until I met her, I didn’t know that vegetables even came in cans — and Margo didn’t know that they came any other way. She had some flavor revelations that year — though to this day I think she still prefers canned peas to fresh.

Joanne’s cooking made me less cautious. The recipes she got from her mom consisted of a list of ingredients and nothing more. She threw dishes together without measuring — she’d just toss things in until it tasted right. She used herbs with verve, instead of doling them out in pinches. I still make tuna salad her way, with chopped scallions and plenty of dried dill.

As for me, I think I pushed them all to be a bit more adventurous (though on reflection, it’s quite possible my disastrous Welsh Rarebit experiment had the opposite effect).

The occasional inedible cheesy flop aside, I learned a lot that year in the kitchen. It wasn’t the Ivy League education my folks thought they were paying for, but over time it has proved at least valuable as my college coursework. Cooking taught me to go beyond the textbook, to dive in and try things fearlessly, to accept failure, to learn from my mistakes, to trust my instincts and to open my mind and appreciate the differences as well as the similarities to be found in others’ experiences and backgrounds.

And the most important discovery of all that year was the fun of cooking and eating with friends. The long dinner conversations we shared night after night are some of my best memories from college.

The food? Not so much.

 

* * * * *

 

Like the styles we wore in the sixties, foods from that era have cycled in and out of fashion several times in the intervening years. This macaroni salad recipe was my favorite back in the day, when pasta salad was a brand new concept. Nowadays with its “secret” ingredient of Kraft Catalina dressing, it seems retro, and extremely unsophisticated  — and I can imagine a thousand more interesting variations. But I still make it this way once in a while, for old time’s sake. (Note, this is a Joanne recipe, so all ingredient amounts are approximate.)

 

Macaroni Salad

 

1 lb. elbow macaroni

1/3 cup mayonnaise

1/4 cup Kraft Catalina dressing

4 Tbsp. white vinegar

1 Tbsp. (or less) sugar

Salt and pepper to taste

2 cucumbers, seeded and diced

4 carrots, diced

1 onion, diced

2 green or red peppers (or one of each), diced

1-2 zucchini, diced

Boil a big pot of water (see, Home Ec does come in handy), add salt and cook the macaroni according to the package directions (about 7 minutes). Drain and turn into a large bowl. Mix together the mayonnaise, salad dressing, vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper (adjusting the dressing to your taste) and toss into the noodles.

Add the chopped vegetables and toss. Chill for at least half an hour, to let the flavors blend.

This is great for picnics or potlucks — it makes a huge bowl and serves 12 to 20.