On an absolutely ordinary evening sometime this last summer, I walked into my sister’s kitchen (who we were housesitting for), hungry with no plan for dinnner. Assessing the situation, we had:
- a handful of little yukon gold potatoes
- a couple other veggies from our garden we’d brought with us
- a ripe avocado
- a few grape tomatoes
- some eggs
Inspiration sprung from that one really nice avocado. We ended up eating the dish featured in the big photo above… fried potatoes seasoned with Mexican-style spices, topped with sautéed veggies, then diced tomatoes and avocado next to those poached eggs. A little chipotle sauce to finish it off. Honestly, it wasn’t fancy, but it was simple. It was healthy. It was delicious.
You can learn the skills you need to walk into your possibly-less-than-instagram-ready kitchen and make a plan to feed yourself and others with very little stress or confusion.
Say you wanted to play the violin in an orchestra. You wouldn’t just walk into an auditorium, pick up a violin, and expect to play with experienced musicians. You would first learn how to hold a violin, how to use the bow on the strings, which strings make which notes, and how to read them on a page. Then you would learn to play the violin’s part alongside all the other instrumental parts to create a whole work of music.
And so it is with cooking, except cooking is a lot easier to learn than the violin.
Like learning to play music, learning to cook can happen in a variety of ways. You can take cooking classes – many are offered at culinary schools or community colleges. There are a billion tutorials on Youtube. Learning to follow a recipe is just a matter of knowing the right vocabulary – the difference between mincing and dicing, or searing and sautéing. Acquiring this kind of head-knowledge is a great way to learn and see new skills demonstrated.
However, I hope when you see the gleaming tile and chrome kitchens featured in these shows, you won’t be discouraged to even try. You can cook without some sidekick standing around making wise cracks, without 400 tiny glass bowls to hold your ingredients, and definitely without the chrome. You can even cook in a tiny kitchen with two working burners and a cheap, non-stick frying pan.
Years ago, when our son wanted to take piano lessons, we knew a very talented musician who was the head of the music department at a college near us. He very generously made himself available for some lessons, and surprised us by NOT insisting Sam learn how to read music right away. Instead, he taught Sam how to identify chords: how they work and how they fit together. The math behind the music. Sam only had a handful of lessons, but he can still hear any song and figure out how to play it almost instantly. He was taught to play intuitively, not just what’s on a page of music.
You can learn to cook intuitively as well. If you have the desire to cook (or even just to eat good food), and you make the space in your schedule, you can become the person who walks into any kitchen, considers what’s available, and creates good food on the fly.
Learning to cook intuitively can be broken down into specific, bite-sized (if you will) pieces.
For the sake of search engine optimization, let’s call them “The 5 Skills you need for Intuitive Cooking”. They are as follows:
- Identify your diet
- Gather your tools
- Know your flavors
- Prep your food
- Choose your heat
If you familiarize yourself with each of these skills, you can claim Level 3 Adult Status. I just made that up, but it should count for something.
In the posts that follow, I’ll be touching on each of these five categories. I hope this gives you some encouragement, and maybe a few ideas about what’s possible in your own kitchen!
