Cooking 101

       I got thinking this morning while shopping at the local grocery store.

            In fact, I like to cook, really just experimenting on myself and my relatives and friends. And I am willing to admit failure sometime, like what I made just is not too much fun to eat, or otherwise popular.  Then the dogs and other critters give me a fall back.  Now more often it is enjoyable to eat, too. So if someone asks me for a recipe, usually I don't know the proper answer since I just use ideas to try out. Anyway, it is fun to me.

            It's a little bit like a high a school chemistry experiment, with the emphasis on "experiment".  After all whatever food we cook does interact different ways.

            What got me thinking was that I am a male, and somehow females got associated with cooking. Why I do not know, especially thinking few of us are born knowing how to cook and prepare food. Usually we have to be taught. Fortunately, I had a grandmother who took the time, now and then, to teach me some of her tricks and methods. She was a good cook, and a good presenter of food, too.

            Mostly she often ignored me (when I lived with her) as she was pretty busy, too. And often the hard things, like shucking beans and pulling their strings (from the farms), and pulling up nut grass, well I ended up getting the work as an assignment. My younger brother would usually slink off, "usually". I guess we grandkids end up running together in our grandmother's minds, though I distinctly remember her in my mind. Also my mother, her daughter, was a crummy cook, and I guess a disappointment to her own mother in the cooking arena.

            And, when you think about it, cooking and serving food to the eaters gives the person doing the work a lot of power, influence, preaching power, whatever, as long as it feeds the critters who eat it. And often it is the female of the human species who does the cooking and serving.  Again, why I do not know, but that does seem to be the way things are in general. So I guess most females just have to learn on their own these days in the USA. Now if they are lucky, somebody they grew up with taught them something, too, including about cooking. Now if nobody taught them, then they, and even I, have to now figure it out all over. What a crummy deal.

            Like 350 F (177 C) is a good temperature to bake and cook most things at if you don't know any better, like if you have never been better taught otherwise. And if you have never been taught, then you just have to keep an eye on the food to see when it is "done", like cooked. Use your own judgment and eyes. And there is such a thing as cook's prerogative, like taste it yourself to see what you think.

            End of cooking 101. There won't be a test.