I Learned How to Cook and Now I'm a Better Person
If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I love to cook. For me, cooking is a fun outlet to exercise my creativity and challenge myself. It’s an enjoyable evening activity for me to find a new recipe, hunt down the ingredients (or substitutes), assemble the creation, and make it pretty for pictures. Cooking is the perfect way for me to unwind after work and allow my brain to switch from the screen mode it was addicted to all day to the natural act of engaging with physical foods and creating an appetizing meal as a reward for surviving the day.
But, believe it or not, this wasn’t the case four years ago.
In fact, if you remember my ye olde YouTube days that I have since retired from, you might recall I had an entire video series all about how terrible of a cook I was. To be honest, it’s some of my best work and some of the most fun I had making YouTube videos so I’m definitely okay with folks checking it out. But the point of the series is that I couldn’t cook to save my life. It was almost a point of pride with how little I could cook because I loved people’s horrified reactions to my awful cooking abilities. They seemed to be especially aghast that the extent of my cooking experience was adding butter to TV dinners that I popped into the microwave.
It’s not a bad way to spice up a TV dinner, by the way. I still highly recommend it.
However, it’s not much of a life to live it solely off of buttered TV dinners. Unfortunately, I was perpetually broke for most of my early to mid-20’s so I couldn’t really afford to eat out either. Being too broke for nothing more than an occasional Wendy’s $5 meal also meant that I couldn’t afford to buy a bunch of groceries to risk wasting them in my efforts to learn how to cook more. By the time I was making enough money to properly feed myself, the issue became time. I had enough time to buy groceries for the week, but never enough time to stand there for an hour or two in my kitchen to get anxious over a cookbook I could barely comprehend. So I stayed in my comfort zone and kept to my usual sad diet, content to survive rather than thrive with my TV dinners and butter.
Two things changed this: Antoni from Queer Eye’s Lemony Rosemary Artichoke Dip and COVID.
I made the artichoke dip for a Super Bowl party and also my (unintentional) last Mealtime with Maddie ever. It was a complicated recipe way above my skill level at the time, but I was trying to reason with the cost of the $40 cookbook that I bought mainly because it was signed by the Queer Eye cooking superstar. The Super Bowl and the fact I love artichoke dip seemed like a good enough reason to give the recipe a shot.
I still remember my first taste of this dish. After banging around my new kitchen for the better part of two hours (including 20-30 minutes just to grate cheese), I wasn’t expecting much from the creamy goop in front of me that I cooked in a hand-me-down casserole dish gifted from a family friend. However, I took a bite of my creation and immediately fell in love. The sharpness of the rosemary contrasted beautifully against the bitter artichoke and sweet lemon. Not only did the flavor absolutely send me to a new dimension, but the pride of knowing that I created something that delicious all on my own with only a handful of ingredients and some gumption filled me with incredible pride. I could create something brand new from scratch! Not only that, but I could create something GOOD and WONDERFUL from scratch.
Antoni from Queer Eye’s Lemony Rosemary Artichoke Dip was my first taste (pun absolutely intended) of creating and owning a self-confidence built on my own satisfaction rather than external validation. While I was proud of my YouTube channel and publishing my first book, I still found that my pride was based mostly on others’ reactions to my work rather than my own satisfaction with it. Cooking became my first outlet in creating something just for my joy rather than the enjoyment of others and having faith in those abilities based on my own reaction to them.
Then the world shut down for the COVID 2019 crisis and I suddenly had the time to pursue that joy.
When I began my cooking journey, I had three seasonings in my cupboard: salt, pepper, and sugar. Some may even say that sugar does not count as a seasoning. To this I reply: what else would you season coffee with? Butter? Butter is for TV dinners, silly goose. Anyways, I had three seasonings, a stack of eclectic cookbooks I collected over the years as part of my general book hoarding efforts, and absolutely no idea where to start. All I knew is that I wanted foods better for me than frozen meals and obviously I couldn’t go out to eat as much due to the quarantine regulations. My brother and I were active student athletes so most of our family meals growing up took place in a drive-through in between games and practices or as an easy twenty minute meal from Hamburger Helper. They were great meals that kept our busy family fed, but that upbringing just meant I didn’t have much exposure to how to cook a meal from scratch before I became an adult either.
So I went to my work group chat. I asked for ideas for how to get started with cooking and my friend Caitlin introduced me to garlic salt. Garlic salt was my first foray into “real” cooking with proper spices. But the first time I cooked eggs with it, I went so overboard with the seasoning that I probably could’ve kept vampires away for the next week. I really had no idea how much stronger of a flavor garlic salt would be compared to regular salt!
From the initial purchase of garlic salt, my seasoning cupboard expanded as recipes called for new spices. I worked my way through easy recipes offered by coworkers or cookbooks, avoiding dishes with unfamiliar instructions or off the wall ingredients. I’d look on YouTube for an instructional video if I was unfamiliar with something. I’ve had to Google image search more than my fair share of new ingredients to identify them at the grocery store. I’d watch meal videos like Buzzfeed’s Worth It and Gordan Ramsay to expose myself to new foods and cooking styles. I kept things simple and grew from there. I’d let myself build confidence with an ingredient or a recipe before expanding on it.
Eventually, I started asking for cooking supplies for birthdays and Christmas, collecting whatever tools people thought would be beneficial for me. I stole an old crockpot from my mom and received an air fryer for Christmas. Both the crockpot and air fryer were game changers for what I could cook. Now anything that called for frying or crispy crusts could be popped into the air fryer rather than trying to figure out how to safely boil oil on my stovetop when I could barely make bread without burning all ten of my fingers. My crockpot became an oasis of soups and casseroles experimenting with all of my new spices that I’d assemble in the morning to enjoy in the evening after work.
Now, three years later, I have gained confidence in not only my cooking abilities, but myself. Messing up on meals allowed me to learn how to accept grace and improve from the experience rather than treat the mistake like an unforgivable failure and waste of food. This newfound grace has taught me well enough that when I botch a dish nowadays, instead of immediately panicking, I can usually recover it well enough to keep it edible which saves me food and money in the long run. Exploring new dishes and trying new cooking techniques has allowed me to use recipes as a relative guide rather than a strict structure of instructions so that I can make the dish work best for both my tastes and cooking style. Allowing this level of creativity with my recipes allows me to take leaps of faith with a dish and land in Flavortown with how delicious I can make it all on my own which continues to build my confidence and trust in myself.
In a way, cooking represents my journey with self-growth. I started with next to nothing and did the best with what I was given. While it wasn’t the greatest, those frozen meals kept me alive until I could get to a point where I had the resources and time to make something better for myself. Even then, I still needed a taste of something great to convince myself learning how to cook would be a worthwhile task. It’s slow work that’s never finished and has required learning in bits and pieces from whatever I could scavenge within my available resources, but eventually I’m at a point where I can trust myself enough to feed myself good food regularly. I still break the occasional egg or burn toast, but ultimately I’m happy with the meals I make for myself. Other people might not enjoy my recipes or think they’re good enough, but I do and that’s the most important thing for me.
In our society too, if you live alone, it’s expected that you won’t cook for yourself because it’s such a waste of time and food for just one person. I wholly reject that notion and believe the perfect time to learn how to cook is for yourself. You shouldn’t have to wait for someone else to enjoy your favorite meal. It’s the same for self-growth. You shouldn’t need to improve yourself just because you only want to improve for others. It’s a great benefit to improve yourself to improve your relationships, but you should improve yourself because you want to improve for you. More importantly, after learning how to cook for yourself, you will have better tools to cook for others. Just keep in mind that even after your hard work, you might still mess up on a dish. That’s okay. As long as you learn from the experience and know how to improve the recipe for next time, the effort was worthwhile and you’re still doing great as you are.
Just start with adding butter to your frozen TV dinners. You’ll figure out the rest later.