Current music:

The Rolling Stones, "Under My Thumb"

Arsenal

One of the neatest things about cooking is the personal encyclopedia of dishes each cook develops over the years. My mother, for example, can make almost any sort of Gujurati curry without even consulting a recipe book or measuring out her ingredients. It bothered me to no end when I would ask her about how much cumin, how many teaspoons of garam masala she'd put into a dish and she'd shrug her shoulders, open her hand and say "this much" - a small, colorful clot of spice on her palm. I wonder if things started that way - if she began making curry by carefully weighing out all the ingredients and over time unconsciously developed a method that didn't require careful measurements. In Khoja culture as with many other ethnic communities there are no real cookbooks - every woman (and it is almost always the women) learns to cook from her mother or sisters; I have a vision of my mother, under the watchful direction of her mother, peering over the metal rim of a sauce pot.

Learning the art.

I'm slowly developing my own library, shelving away sauces, spice combinations, techniques away in the back of my head and getting to the point where I can whip 'em up on short notice. Today I made a rather decadent macaroni and cheese and saw that the cheese sauce called for a starting base of flour and butter. A little lightbulb went off in my head when I read those two items, and somewhere in my brain an inner voice said "Flour and butter. That's a bechamel sauce. You know how to do that." And from that point on I didn't even bother to read the items as separate objects - they were just a bechamel sauce, two parts of a construction.

One of my friends introduced me to a Russian proverb last week - "Povtoreniye - Maht Ucheniya" - "Repetition is the Mother of Learning". It's strange how often I've repeated the same movements in cooking over and over again; cutting potatoes until I could get the pieces down to near-translucent slivers, boiling eggs until I figured out the perfect timing to get the yolks soft but not runny - the way my father enjoys them - or a host of other minutinae picked up over the years.

***

The first dish I remember consciously cooking without help was Yakisoba - Japanese fried noodles. Junior year of college; I was twenty years old and had just moved into an apartment four blocks from the beach after living in residence dorms. I'd just finished Kafka On The Shore and wanted pan fried noodles, so I drove over to Albertson's and picked up three packets of instant Yakisoba from their "Asian Foods" themed section (which as I recall was a 5'x3.5' refrigerated corner in one corner of the supermarket). I was elated - here I was about to cook my first decent meal.

When I made the first packet of noodles I neglected to read the directions.

It was disastrous. I remember scraping off the charred mass from the bottom of my roommate's pan and trying to figure out what in the nine hells had gone wrong. Then I read the small text on the back of the foil packet and "discovered" that I needed cooking oil - and remember thinking that it was a supremely dumb idea for a company to force the need for anything other than boiled water on its customers (exhibit A: Instant Ramen). So I tore open the second packet of moist noodles and tried again - boiling the noodles first, then putting them into a clean skillet and frying them, this time with oil. Half an hour and one pre-made "spice packet" later I had my first meal: rubbery noodles with gritty dehydrated flavoring. My roommates returned from the gym and immediately tromped into the kitchen, drawn by the salty smell of noodles.

"Wow - that looks good!" exclaimed one.
"Hey N. - you're a chef!" said the other.

I'm just glad they didn't look in the trash.