TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

How Am I Doing, Rachel Ray?

ADVERTISEMENT

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 21, 2009

I love to cook. If my brothers were to remember our childhood, my current cooking skill might come as a shock to them. During my mom's last two pregnancies, I was often asked to cook, as she never felt very well when in the "family way." It seems two of my younger brothers asked Mother, "Can't you teach Rosie how to cook something besides hamburgers and chocolate chip cookies?" At the age of 12, I hadn't yet learned that variety is the spice of life, and that it works well in cooking, too. There were no peas, no carrots, and no salad in my meals - just meat and cookies. At my brothers' request, Mom taught me how to prepare pork chops. I then served pork chops and chocolate chip cookies at every opportunity. I still love pork chops Mom's way - thin, bone-in, floured with garlic and onion powders added, and fried. However, I only eat them occasionally now, instead of at every meal as I wanted to then.

When I leased my first apartment in my 20s, my roommate and I decided we would teach ourselves to cook. At that time Julia Child's book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," was all the rage, so that's the one we decided to use as a textbook. We definitely could have done worse. Julia certainly knew how to cook - it might not have been diet food, but it sure was good. Her slightly orange-flavored chocolate mousse recipe is absolutely the best mousse I've ever tasted!

However, occasionally Julia would assume we novices had a little more cooking knowledge than we did, which would result in some terrible but funny results. My roommate and I didn't know a whole head of garlic is not the same as a clove. You can imagine how garlicky the dish was with about 10 times the amount needed. Our guests' eyes were watering as they tried to eat it. We quickly learned to try out recipes before serving them at dinner parties.

Another time we decided to make Crepes Suzette, with cognac used to flame the dish. When it came time to ignite the cognac, it wouldn't flame. We tried and tried. As we had worked long and hard on this recipe, we decided to eat it anyway. Well, we got drunker than skunks on the unflamed liqueur. Later we learned what Julia had failed to tell us, that cognac will not flame until it has reached a certain temperature. At least, we suffered alone on this brandy-laced disaster.

In Speech class in college, students had to demonstrate making something in front of the class in order to learn to talk and "do" at the same time. I chose to prepare potato salad. In addition to taking the ingredients with me, I made a batch at home, so I would have enough to feed the whole class. Unbeknownst to me, my father had knocked over a partially consumed beer into my potato salad. He hadn't known this was a special salad to be delivered to my class, so he just stirred in the beer, thinking no one would know. The poor class! First, they had to endure the pungent odor of chopped onions and hard-boiled eggs, waiting to "make an entrance" in my preparations, then they had to eat a batch of beer-laced potato salad. No one wanted to insult me, so I didn't learn of my father's mishap until he, with great apologies, told me what had happened. The final blow was when my father told a cooking-editor friend of the incident; next thing I knew the story, my photo, and the recipe ended up in the cooking section of the Indianapolis Star Sunday edition.

Through the years, with the help of many good cookbooks, although still frequently making mistakes, I've become a pretty good cook. Today, though, I'm a modern-day cook, too busy to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. My favorite cookbook now, at least for desserts, is "The Cake Mix Doctor," in which author Anne Byrn says on the book's cover that she doctors "cake mixes to create more than 150 luscious desserts with honest-to-goodness from-scratch taste."

I thought of this column as a lead-in to a plea for cooks for the Emergency Squad teams. I had heard that some of the teams needed them. You see, if squad members spend time cooking for themselves, invariably they get an emergency call in the middle of preparations. It doesn't always work to turn off the heat in the middle of a recipe. However, in talking with the squad's chief, I found out that they now have enough cooks. Or, perhaps she found out about all my cooking misadventures and got scared!

Rosie Clifton is the author of "Kissing Lots of Frogs, a Long Journey to Love." She may be reached through her Web site at rosieclifton.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT