One is, I don't actually dislike cooking. What am I doing with a food blog if I don't like to cook? Well, I don't like to act in big-budget action movies either, but I sure as hell love watching Samuel L. Jackson dealin' with some motherfuckin' snakes on a motherfuckin' plane. (Yeah, I know, 2006 called, they want their pop-culture references back.) Anyway, I assumed that my natural reluctance to cook was because a: I'm lazy and b: I didn't like doing it. But the other day, I'd planned to cook, and I found out that hey, I really do like cooking, if I have time to plan ahead and to space my prep throughout the day. What I don't like is having to cook last minute when I'm half-awake in the late afternoon and I'm scrambling to figure out what the hell to fix.
The other thing I found out is that when it comes to cooking, I am apparently incapable of sticking to a damn recipe. Baking, absolutely - you can't screw around with stuff there when you don't know what you're doing. But when it comes to cooking, I get all crazy. I had a recipe for a cold soba noodle salad from the newspaper that I wanted to try. Now, first of all, it called for cilantro, and as I've said before, I loathe cilantro. So of course, that was right out. Then I decided, "Oooh, some beef would be good in this." So I picked up a chunk of eye of round from FuBonn, which was where I'd gone to get the noodles (and some mochi and Pocky, shut up) and other supplies. I sliced it up - it ended up being thicker than I envisioned, but that's because I got no knife skills. It's kinda like drawing - I can picture in my head what I want to draw, and it looks beautiful, but what comes out on the paper looks like something a reanimated, decapitated chicken would scrawl while it stumbled about looking for its head.
Ahem. I digress. Anyway, I sliced the meat and marinated it all afternoon in soy sauce, rice vinegar, lemon juice, ginger, brown mustard, garlic (diced by Littlest), onion (sliced by Littlest), and a touch of sugar. When cooking time came, I seared the meat slices in a pan with the leftover tomatoes from the previous night's cheeseburgers, and we mixed them in with the noodles. The recipe called for the noodles to be tossed in soy sauce and rice vinegar, but the meat had so much flavor that it would've been too much, so we just mixed it all together with plenty of sesame seeds and ate.
The meat was a little too salty, a hazard of soy sauce, and I'll work on that next time, but it was a tasty meal. And I learned a couple of things. I'm not a half-bad cook, and I really can enjoy it if I can take my time with it. Also, often a recipe isn't a law, but a guideline. Much like traffic regulations in Portland, you don't have to follow it to the letter unless you want to. And it's often a lot more fun just to play with it and see what happens.
Also, if you're in the Portland area, FuBonn has some damn good beef. And mochi. Mmm, mochi.
Sorcha
