ANYWAYS, cooking…

Cooking is something that you can get better at easily because the very nature of needing to eat means that you have the opportunity to practice it several times a day. And I do think its something that takes practice. If you are reading this then there’s probably a good chance you’ve eaten food that I have made and most people have told me that what I make them is good. That said, I know for a fact that I have screwed up, and not a little bit. Once when I was a teenager tasked with making the family dinner I ruined it with too much cinnamon. I knew I screwed it up and my family was not really shy about telling me that it wasn’t good. I have also cooked dinners for my wife that were “not my favorite”. This is ok, its part of the process, its part of life. As long as its not literally inedible or going to make someone sick they can, and will, get over it. They (you) get to eat again in like 8-12 hours. This too shall pass. This also doubles as advice for eating something you might not like, be it trying new stuff or eating something that someone has made you that you might not care for. Eat it anyways and move on with your life. You get to eat again. This is not your last meal. And ESSPECIALLY don’t make the other person feel bad that you didn’t like it. That can be CRUSHING for someone trying to get better at cooking.

My first bit of advice is stop trying to cook recipes and start cooking food. You don’t need to cook; Jamie Oliver’s Tuscan chicken with Venetian cannellini bean and Tuscan arugula salad. You need to cook beans and chicken

Learning to food ingredients rather than recipes will lift your skills faster than anything else. How do you do this? Easy pick foods and cook them. I’m not trying to be obstinate here, I’m trying to make you see that food (specifically dinner) doesn’t have to be A Thing™ every night. It doesn’t have to be something specific. It can just be food. I’ll include an example towards the end.

This leads well into my next point, one I was sort of making earlier. Food, by its nature is ephemeral. If you don’t absolutely CRUSH dinner tonight, guess what. You’ll have another chance tomorrow. If you don’t love what you made, learn from it. Think about why, was it the flavor? Was it the the texture? Was it the combination of ingredients? Whatever it was, next time, do it different. Bam. You learned, you got better. Well done. You’re well on your way.

Now, I’m not an idiot. I hear you yelling at the screen. “But Corey! How do I know what to change!?!?” Easy. Was it just kind of bland? Add salt. Was the texture wrong? You either cooked too hot or too cold resulting in it cooking too long or not long enough (It was probably too hot). Was it just kind of ::gestures vaguely:: missing something? Acid, it was missing acid, squeeze some citrus on it or add a splash of vinegar. Trust me. Was it overly dry and not pleasant in the mouth? It didn’t have enough fat.

Salt, fat, acid, heat. 4 simple words. UNLIMITED possibilities for deliciousness.

I debated heavily on whether or not to include the following as it strays much to closely to a …recipe (Dragnet sting). Now that I have decided to include it, I don’t know exactly how. Should I just give some examples of what I cook on a weeknight? Or should I instead I’m going to phrase it as a series of tips and advice? Por que no los dos? Idk. I assume that if you’ve made it this far you’re pretty comfortable with my disjointed and rambling style. So I’d like to give an example (or maybe 2) of what I might serve on a random weeknight. One of which is what I like to call Ground Beef du Jour, or sometimes just “brown food”, it goes something like this. Ground beef in a pan, till its brown, not grey, brown, add some spices that I like from the pantry, maybe 3 tablespoons total, add a tomato paste and some hoisin/oyster sauce, stir till its glossy and bubbly. Separate pan, throw down a bit of oil and some broccoli florets, cook till done. How do I know its done? I taste it. Serve with rice. Congratulations now you’re cooking like Corey. We eat this at least once a week. Its delicious. Does it have a name? No….Ok ok yes you’re technically correct, it does because I named it to be funny. But the point is its not like A Thing its just food. And the best part, none of it is rigid. You could do it with chicken or pork, you could swap out the veg, you could serve it over spaghetti if you wanted. Want to make it “better” cook some diced onions and mushrooms into your beef. There are no rules.

Now here are some rules(of thumb):¹

• Brown your meat don’t grey it.
  • Cooking gringo tacos with a kit from the grocery store? Box says brown the ground beef doesn’t it? Cook it till it turns BROWN. I know this sounds so dumb but I swear to glob it will make your food so much better.²
• You (probably) need less heat than you think
  • I do about 95% of my cooking at, or just above, medium heat.
  • The exceptions are deep frying, boiling, and when you need a HEAVY sear on a hunk of beast. Which are all up near 9-10/10.
• …But let your pan PREHEAT
  • Any kind of pan, let it sit there for a min or 3
• USE MORE SALT
• The fewer ingredients a you are using the more they matter³
• I’m probably forgetting one
• Have Fun
  • this is just like any other hobby. Meant to be enjoyed. Even though it has a large amount of utility.

Ok I think I’m done. I don’t have some grand conclusion. I don’t even really know what the whole point of this was other than sharing my thoughts. I just want people to eat and be happy. Thanks for reading

~Corey

One of these properties was a very charming little brick house from the 1950s with everything we wanted and needed. It was a really perfect fit. It was a teeny tiny bit out of our Self-Imposed price cap but still within the what we could afford. The kicker was it just so happened to be, in the neighborhood and one street over (like 300 yards away) from my best friend of 25 years (shout out the Daily Downshift)

I really wanted this property. So I asked our real estate agent if it would be appropriate and helpful for me to write a letter to the seller, entreating them to consider our offer (as it was likely to be a lower offer) for the sake of the story of my friendship. I was really attempting to pull on the heartstrings. I even asked for the opportunity to increase our offer if it was close to their top offer. Essentially I was trying to ask for something like the right of first refusal

Anyways, in that letter, as I’m wont to do, I used…what I would call…AP vocabulary, or put less kindly 11 Dollar Words (Its just like 10 Dollar Words but they go to 11). Most of which I’m confident and familiar enough with that I didn’t figure it would be a problem. However, one of these words stood out to me as having been misused in a pique of overwrought verbosity…

::Cough::

If you’ve spent any amount of time reading this blog, hanging out with me, being internet friends. Then you know that it’s something of a foible of mine to not proofread well, I don’t have an editor, and you must know well that sometimes my word choice gets in my own way. I do find that I often forget words or know that I know a word for a thing but have a hard time bringing it to mind. All of which is why when I went back and reread my letter, this particular word stuck out to me is possibly being used incorrectly.

So, being the modern era, instead of having a human that I trust and love proofread/edit my work, I threw it into ¹Chatty-G and asked if I was using the word correctly…. I was not. So I asked if it could help me find the right word or refactor that sentence to actually ask what I was trying to ask or say what I was trying to say. After I was happy with the results I gave the letter to my wife to proofread. I did ask specifically if she thought any of it was written by AI. I explained what I did and she said it sounded pretty much just like me. Which was encouraging because, ultimately I only swapped out a few words.

Well, we didn’t get that house. I never go any feedback about the letter either. I was so frustrated at this point in the house hunting process that I deleted this letter and I don’t even remember that word I was trying to use. BUT, what that whole kerfuffle was good for was making me realized that when its something I am passionate about…I can and do enjoy writing.

All my life, all through school I hated writing. I was bad at it and that made a lot of my education very fraught and caused me no end of trouble. In fact, once in middle school I failed a history test because it was all essay based and my teacher graded on grammar as well as content. So it has been quite refreshing actually to learn that writing can actually be something that I can not only do…passably…but can also be something that I enjoy doing. Thus. This blog.

~ Corey