My first cooking post

As many of my friends know, I really like to cook. I don’t know why I never really talk about it to anybody but my wife, so I figured I’d let out a few blog posts on the matter.

Firstly, let me set the stage. With respect to cooking, I’m just a normal guy , as amateur as they come. By no means can I say I can really cook. Like everything else we do in life, it’s all about knowing the basics and that’s something that I don’t know nearly enough about. I just never had anybody to learn from in my life.

I do however find cooking rewarding. I enjoy being in the kitchen. If I make a good dish, I enjoy sharing it with my family. (I don’t really enjoy eating it myself, it never looks like I want it to, and by the time it’s made, I’m already fairly exhausted of both energy and the desire to eat. — I just like making it.)

My MO has always been simple, maybe even a little crazy. Basically, I look at recipe books (the kind with pictures), decide on what I think I’d like to make, and then I see if I can pull a recipe off. I may swap out some of the ingredients and try to adjust the flavor to something I know my kids will like, but within reason I do generally try to follow what they’re presenting to me best I can. Also, I don’t really enjoy making staple meals so I try to find something pretty different each time I dig into my books.

Ok, so that’s me up to date, and here’s my first cooking post.!

This Christmas was pretty special for me with respect to cooking. My wife went out and bought an complete new set of pots and pans, a wok, and a few other things to make our kitchen a better place for me. It was all stuff that I would have never dreamed of buying for myself. (Literally — I was in shock when I unwrapped it.) I guess that’s what Christmas is all about — allowing others to gift very personal stuff to you, the kind of stuff you’d never buy for yourself, you don’t think you deserve, etc.

Well, the pans are amazing. They’re all nonstick which is totally new to me, and they’re super heavy duty things too. Supposedly they heat better than regular pans because of the type of metal they are. I can’t say I have enough experience to verify that yet, but I did test it out by trying to flash cook some carrots tonight.

It was really two specific pans that I think are going to set me free though, a non stick wok, and this funny looking half skillet / half stock pot skillet looking thing. With the two of them, at least tonight, I cooked a fried regular potato/sweet potato dish which I just pulled out of my imagination, a marinated steak / broccoli /ginger dish Chinese dish I pulled from one of my favorite cookbooks, and I garnished it with some seared carrots that I just kind of wanted to see what happened with because of my high heat pans

My wife loved it all. My four year old just wanted more cartos, and since it was just supposed to be a garnish and I didn’t make much, I loved the potato dish as did everybody else. My daughter really liked the steak from the Chinese food dish. And my ever selective babysitter who pretty much won’t eat anything loved everything.

It was a great meal.

At least as far as I’m concerned, I really don’t know what to post first, the place to go get the pans, or the recipes I used. Either way, we had a great family meal tonight. I feel like I did my job as a provider providing healthy foods for my family to eat.

More to come.!