At some point in our undergraduate careers, most of us live in accommodations with some sort of cooking facilities. This can be quite a liberating experience; after a year of being confined to the dining halls, we find ourselves with access to stoves, ovens and even that forbidden fruit of the Housing Department: the George Foreman Grill. Now, we say, is the time to spread our wings and begin a new life of experimentation with many and various culinary delights.
There's just one problem: Not one of us has the foggiest idea what to do in the kitchen. Oh, a few lucky souls may have been born into families gifted at cooking or learned the tricks of the trade under a particularly sagacious home ec teacher. But on the whole, giving kitchens to a bunch of college students seems about as wise as passing out matchbooks at an insane asylum.
But of course, we think, "I'm going to beat the system. Somewhere some fool is eating Ramen noodles for breakfast, but not I!" We hunt around for some recipes and settle on cooking up some pan-seared, herb-encrusted tilapia with a balsamic reduction and Cinnamon Profiteroles. The preparation seems somewhat difficult, but hey, these things always look tough at first glance. People cook stuff like this all the time, right?
So we hop in the Batmobile and head off to the store. Now few among us are strangers to the grocery store. It's an idyllic place that figures prominently in many childhood memories -- albeit ones of getting separated from our parents and crying like an emo kid in an onion-processing plant. The grocery store, however, is an entirely new ballgame without the parental units. Difficulties abound. Say the recipe calls for a large pepper. What sort of pepper are we talking about here? A green one? A red one? An orange one? Some variety that appears to be named after Simón Bolivar? All of a sudden, that organic chemistry homework doesn't seem so difficult anymore.
Still, despite all the potential pitfalls of the produce section, getting the ingredients is the easy part. The tortuous process awaiting us when we get home is a mess of knives, pots and burners. (Oh my!) Even worse, most recipe instructions rival the Dead Sea scrolls in crypticness. "Slice" is a pretty clear directive, but "sauté" is somewhat less so and "julienne" might as well be a girl from middle school, for all we know.
Undeterred, we jump in anyway. After all, we're educated people. This ought not to be that complicated. But somehow, it is. It's like learning to walk all over again, a chemistry lab from hell. By the time the whole business is done with, we're left with a small, charred piece of meat indistinguishable from a prehistoric fossil, and we're late for a meeting to boot. Another night of PB&J, or as the gourmets call it, "nut pâté with tarty grape preserves."
As a result, we often end up settling for lesser fare. Many a time I have questioned a classmate who claims to be quite a cook, only to find out his specialty is macaroni and cheese. Of course, breakthroughs are always possible. I've seen friends of mine make chicken cordon bleu and honey-glazed salmon. Heck, I myself somehow managed to put together a pot of posole, a Mexican stew, and went by "Matteo" for a couple days to commemorate the accomplishment.
But it's safe to say that most of us are probably best served by staying out of the kitchen. There are all sorts of benefits to this: more time for work, less risk of embarrassing skillet-fire episodes and most importantly, no dishes to do. This last point is not to be scoffed at. Even among a group of otherwise bosom friends, a pile of dirty dishes is guaranteed to trigger finger-pointing and feelings of resentment. In some patriarchal societies, if one brother leaves his dirty soup pot for the other, the family takes sides and civil war erupts.
Somehow, we all at last grope our way into adulthood and during the process acquire a grasp of the culinary arts. Probably the only way to accomplish this is by trial and error. If I were you, though, I'd keep the Ramen noodles handy, just in case. That and a fire extinguisher.
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