Until the age of 22 the height of my culinary talents was heating up a frozen pizza. Sometimes people say that, but when you really quiz them on it it's not true.
"Well can you make pasta?"
"Oh well obviously pasta."
"What about chicken?"
"I mean, I could do a stir fry or something. But sure anyone can do that."
"What about grilled salmon with fresh blueberry corn salsa?"
"Ah well sure I've been doing that since primary school."
But I am being completely and pathetically honest when I say pizza was absolutely the most complicated thing I could make. Any of my undergrad housemates can testify to this. I could pre-heat the oven, put in the frozen pizza, and it would come out. Sometimes cooked all the way through if I was willing to scrape away the charcoal.
Then I moved in with my friend Anna whose (possibly imagined) judgemental stares finally forced me to change. She almost reduced me to tears with her silent ridicule over the "microwave pasta" fiasco. And rightly so. (Microwave pasta is really awful. It tastes like sellotape).
I learned to cook actual pasta. I faced my fear of raw chicken (though still wrap it in 7 separate bags in the fridge), and that year I made my first stir fry. It was horrible but I developed my now motto: There's Usually Something Salvageable. It will be the title of my successful short cookery book that covers 10 different ways to put chicken with pasta.
Since then I've reached an okay level. I would certainly not be confident hosting a televised Come Dine With Me, but I manage to intake daily nutrients and not poison myself. This year I've tried to cook new things. Last week I attempted steak. My Mum, who is a really good cook, told me; "Steak is really easy! You can't get it wrong!"
I got it wrong. True to my motto, if you hacked away long enough there was something salvageable, but overall, it tasted like a boot. Much to the extreme irritation of many people, I cannot stand any amount of red in any meat. However, when my Mum cooks steak it's not red, but lacks the rubbery texture of a boot. "Cook both sides for a few minutes!" she said. I did and it was absolutely red-raw. It took about half an hour to get the red down to a manageable level and by that time I had successfully burned away any remaining taste. I eventually gave up on trying to eliminate the red and just didn't eat the centre. I don't know how there was any steak left when I was finished frying it, let alone how it was still slightly raw in the middle.
"The pepper sauce is nice…" Dan said, kindly. It didn't take much skill to add milk to the instant pepper sauce powder though.
More culinary adventures to follow.