A Brief History of Cooking

In an effort to establish a cohesive theme to my blog and motivate me to write more often, I've decided to pick one topic and write through it in a serial fashion rather than follow the stream of consciousness/writer's block flow I dealt with until now.  Because I've been spending a lot of time with my recipe site, I'm focusing on this as my first topic.  Some of it will be a discussion on design, some of it will simply be philosophizing, and some of it may wind up being a technical deep dive.

To that end, I'm likely to repeat some content from previous posts, but I hope the content will be more in-depth.  Where it's relevant, I'll probably double post here and in the README.md file that's housed in my source code repository.

Today's post is about my history with cooking and how it led up to my motivation to write a recipe site.  I've mentioned my history a bit in passing in the past, but I'm going to back up a bit and take a more in-depth view.

I've been interested in cooking since my teenage years.  Much of what I started out cooking was simple - frozen pierogi, enchiladas made from pre-cooked chicken and bottled sauce, and basic mac and cheese.  Still, given the typical teenager's typical lack of motivation, I find my initial efforts from those years commendable.

My cooking skills went on hiatus for my first three years of college, as dorms and 20-year-old roommates living in dilapidated apartments aren't conducive to culinary exploration.  However, I started again my senior year when I lived in a small apartment by myself.  It's not too much of a stretch to say my ambition outstripped my talent at that juncture.  I attempted to make relatively complex dishes like spinach and bechamel lasagna without really understanding how to boil water appropriately, and the results you'd expect followed.

Still, I forged on.  After graduating from college, I regressed a bit in my experimentation.   As I was living on a budget, I had my food routine down pat for the week.  My principal contribution to cooking from this era was a combination of fettuccine (I finally learned how to boil water), whole canned tomatoes, dried basil, and freshly grated parmesan that my roommate graciously shared with me when his mom would drop a bag of it off at our place.  It was a simple dish and my Monday night staple (along with a purchased baguette), but, unbeknownst to me, it held the keys to my cooking philosophy in later years.

Then, I started dating a girl who liked to cook with some frequency - at least when we wouldn't wind up getting too lazy and just go to Culver's for butter burgers - and discovered Epicurious.  Epicurious was fabulous (and, in my opinion, still is), but it led me back into the dark ages of college cooking with its detailed instructions to make everything from scratch and 4-hour sessions of culinary immersion.  Try as I might, I wasn't prepared to keep up, so my attempts at that time were very spotty.

I'd like to say that I reached my end state in the next few years rather than wandering around in a recipe wilderness and occasionally hitting on a bright spot in the forest.  But, considering that I haven't quite reached the edge of the wood today, I won't say anything.

However, I did gain a lot of experience:

• I learned to trust myself more than a specific recipe.  I can generally look at a recipe now and determine if it's going to work as written or if it needs adjustment.  Sometimes I'm surprised that someone even bothered to write the recipe as written, as there's no way in hell it's going to work.
• I learned I'm not a foodie.  Some people can really appreciate a fresh, vine-ripened tomato in the middle of summer and swear they can tell the difference between the bulk fruit shipped out in winter.  I'm not one of those people.  This has helped me determine where I can cheat on ingredients, and where I need to focus.  I do know my taste buds couldn't care less if the cheese is actually from the Parma region.
• I'm not big on presentation.  I do want the food to look pretty, but if my lasagna falls apart while plating it, but still contains all the flavor I crave - oh well!
• I'm a perfectionist when it comes to searching for recipes.  I've spent years tweaking a blue cheese pasta recipe in the hopes of coming close to matching something I ate at a resort in Wisconsin 17 years ago.  I keep looking for better and quicker variations on some of my old favorites.
• I'm not a fan of making cooking a marathon event.  I don't mind spending an hour in the kitchen, but my sweet spot for cooking is 30 - 45 minutes.  If I can leave some things around for a few hours or a day - like bread, marinated meats, or olive dressing - that's an easy and delicious trade-off.  However, I'm never going to brag about making an all-day ragu sauce.  There are plenty of shortcuts I can take that meet the criteria of close enough.  
• I prefer using general tools with a few specialty items that make cooking significantly easier (a cast iron pizza 'stone' and a mandolin are the two big ones that come to mind).
• I prefer simple, more traditional food, but I'm not a traditionalist.  I'll make a Cuban sandwich with ciabatta bread.
• If the above two bullet points offend you, please re-read the second bullet point.
• I have some irrational need to develop X number of recipes for rotation across a year.  Typically, that number is 52 (for obvious reasons), but it goes up and down.  I'm reaching a point where I'm getting close to that number with a lot of recipes that I've made at least a few times.  It's taken a lot of experimentation and discipline to write down the recipes that I want to keep (as well as the discipline to jettison some of the dogs even if I really want to like them).  I'll admit that discipline has been spotty, so that's why this journey's taken me 20+ years to get to where I'm at.  I suspect when I hit my number and document my recipes (assuming I will this time.  But, hey, if I can blog with relative consistency, then I'll probably be able to hit a cooking target), I'll just add to what's there, because that's the beauty of food - there are just so many delicious varieties, so why limit yourself?