Running Around!

I’ve never wanted to cook. Historically, I’ve somewhat despised cooking. I simply hadn’t the time. You have to buy the food, cook it, and then clean up. How can that possibly compare to eating out or getting take out? Oh yes, you also need to know HOW to cook. Which I did not.

After many many years of this cycle of not cooking (and not even knowing if I owned pots and pans) — I decided to change all this. I suppose I did it for a number of reasons. Certainly my schedule is much more flexible now allowing me time to cook. I also didn’t always want to eat out or get take out. For whatever reason, I’m much more aware in terms of my body and frankly I can feel the tremendous amount of oil and butter restaurants use. I just wanted to eat more healthy. Not just because I’m on some health kick — but I feel better when I do and I like the food just fine. I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing anything.

I’ve tried to learn to cook before — friends, classes, etc. For some reason, never stuck. Never became inspired. Who knows. In New York, one of my favorite restaurants is L’Ecole — the training school for the French Culinary Institute. The food is delicious, meticulously prepared, and very reasonably priced because it’s a training school. Quite a deal.

I was able to find a chef who was trained there who taught cooking privately (believe it or not, I actually convinced FCI to post a notice to their alumni list) who has turned out to be great. After ONE lesson — Laura has already got me cooking meals on my own. Now, I’m not cooking huge meals. Pasta with a very nice fresh summer tomato sauce. Vegetable soup. Gazpacho. Etc. But I’m cooking. I’m a picky eater too and I think it’s reasonably tasty. Not amazing, but I like it. I’ve sure made my fair share of mistakes. Biggest problem currently is I’m using way too much salt.

One of the things I really like thinking about is learning about how I learn. I’m really into the basics. That may sound obvious and silly but I really am. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was to do it immediately. Now now now. Unfortunately, that turns out to be an easy way to ingrain bad habits which need to be broken later. I also would never realize how good something could be done. Moreover, because I wouldn’t have a strong foundation, I think it actually stunted my creativity because then I didn’t have the foundational elements to branch out from.

So, I was quite excited when Laura said that for the first hour and a half, we would just work on knife skills. ! Well worth it. Well worth it. Sounds ridiculous, but I am way more likely to eat food because I just can prepare food faster. Cut up some fruits? No problem. I think I hit rock bottom when I was buying pre-cut fruit at Whole Foods.

There’s this concept called deliberate practice (I think I read it in Geoff Colvin’s excellent book “Talent is Overrated”). Essentially, conventional wisdom is that to get good at something, you have to practice practice practice. Colvin talks about deliberate practice instead of practice — basically practicing while thinking. Thinking about what you’re doing and how to improve it. I would compare it to me mindlessly preparing recipes and then wondering why my food doesn’t taste good to me methodically preparing recipes and wondering what’s going on each step of the way and why I do what I do and how to improve it. Of course, the flip side is then to have a coach like Laura who you can then ask / use as a resource / teach you / etc. so that you can leverage their skill as an instructor and years of experience.

In any event, Alice Waters has a real nice tomato sauce with bacon and onion in her book “The Art of Simple Food” that I’m going to try out later.