Fear and Loathing

Let's be honest...I dislike cooking. Recipes intimidate me. Fresh veggies stare at me, begging to be used to their flavorful fullness, and I can only roll my eyes and wish that someone else would cook it up for me. If a recipe has too many steps or ingredients that are new to me, I dismiss it. Give me the Betty Crocker cookbook any day. I groan at the load of dishes that gathers after making one meal, a meal that is enjoyed for 30 minutes and during which, most likely, my kids will have thrown the fruits of my labor on the floor or flat out rejected (to which I think 'why did I even bother to cook?'). To make a mess of the kitchen that I just spent a hour cleaning seems like a crying shame. To spend an hour or two preparing a recipe that falls flat on its face is fodder for my loathing. I don't find rest and comfort in the process. It's simply a necessity of the day, a thing to be checked off, and then be on to more fulfilling prospects. If I were rich, I wouldn't bother with a nanny or someone to clean my house. I like taking care of my kids and cleaning soothes me. But I would hire a cook faster than you can say "foodie."

I actually thought, at one point, about starting a blog dedicated to the many reasons that I dislike cooking. Let's be honest: there are thousands of blogs and websites dedicated those who take glory in the stirring, the blending of beautiful colors, the calm that surrounds them as they create sumptuous meals. But are there blogs out there for those like me? Those who love to eat the food, but get a pit in their stomach at the thought of having to make it? Those who get pit stains from the sheer effort of trying to come up with new meal ideas for their family?

Don't get me wrong: I love to eat. I love to eat good, healthy food, with some tasty desserts thrown in. I love seeing what veggies come from my parents' garden and the idea of eating what's in season or what's local fascinates me. I love to eat out at new restaurants and I love it even more when it's a night that I don't have to cook dinner. I guess that not every day or every meal is fear and loathing. But there are definitive moments in my cooking career that definitely tip the scales.

Tonight was just another check mark for the "dislike" vs. "like" of cooking. I decided to be resourceful and use up another of our winter squash from the farmer's market. It was a bright orange round thing, a Golden Nugget, per my mom. I cooked it up just as Betty Crocker suggested (perhaps my first problem of the evening was following her directions and not my mom's). After 45 min, it was still a little hard, so back in the oven it went. After an hour, the chicken was done, the kids were in their chairs hollering for food, and the squash had to be done. Now how to get steaming hot squash out of the shells? Pick it up with an oven mitt and scrape it out with a fork, right? That's a great idea until the hot juices from inside the squash runs down the oven mitt and soaks right through the mitt. And then the shell of the squash, to which I nearly lost a finger trying to cut through when it was raw, decided to completely fall apart as I'm scraping out the innards. As I am trying to pick up the bits of shell to salvage the squash "meat", I realize that the squash isn't nearly as cooked as one might hope. So I am trying to pry hot hard squash from a flimsy shell, meanwhile thinking, "who needs fingertips anyway?" After I finally cut and scrape as much as I can handle from the shell (read: as much as my burnt fingertips allowed), I attempted to pull my wits about me and make something edible from this. A few more minutes of cooking in the microwave didn't exactly make a buttery smooth squash dish. That's when I took out my weapon of choice: the immersion blender. The final product was a somewhat bland (despite my additions of salt, butter, and brown sugar), mildly chunky squash puree. Not at all what I had imagined. Surprisingly, both kids ate a little squash with minimal coaxing and all that was left at the end of the night was a little container of leftovers, bound for the fridge, a reminder of the daily disaster.

So, notes to self, Sweet Dumpling squash is WAY tastier and much easier to cook than Golden Nugget. Golden Nugget looks pretty and its looks are only skin deep. And the butternut squash soup that I made for Christmas Eve, intimidating as it was, turned out pretty amazing. Perhaps there is hope for a "hater" like me.