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| Cooking in the hole |
I’m not sure what got me interested in cooking...
The early signs definitely weren’t encouraging.
Although I’d been taught the basics at home (I’d make mean pancakes at a
relatively young age), I’d failed to evolve. For far too long, I lived on
noodles and fish fingers, spiced up by my very own (and best-forgotten)
innovation, Bisto gravy with a liberal sprinkling of chili flakes. That, or
processed produce from Jack Fulton’s, a culinary disaster zone comprising of
frozen foods shipped in from all corners of the known universe. My early
attempts at impressing my then-girlfriend (now wife) with home-cooked meals
were an unmitigated disaster. My original recipe of meatballs in tomato sauce
with mashed potatoes ended up as barely cooked mince floating in a lukewarm
ocean of readymade pasta sauce served with lumpy, cold mash…after the better
part of three hours spent worrying, sweating and battling an obviously futile
battle in front of the stove. It’s no surprise I was put off trying for a long time. We lived on processed foods, the fridge full of plastic and cardboard packages where it’d have been teeming with fresh produce. Had the oven and microwave broken we’d have starved, as the functions of food preparation beyond reheating ready meals remained a mystery. The terrible diet showed. Always prone to rapid weight gain, I got chubbier and chubbier until I started to resemble a jolly round lady (I am male) much older than my years. Looking at my flabby skin and ample meat, it was almost as if my body was depressed by the nutritionally suspect, heavily salted tat I kept shoveling down my throat.
As worrying as it was to see a fairly prominent pair
of chubby cheeks as I peeked downwards, or as dismaying as it was to watch as a
steadily increasing procession of chins started to make their way down towards
my throat, the obvious health perils of subsisting almost exclusively on
factory-manufactured imitations of food weren’t enough to make me reach for a
recipe book. The breaking point was the cheesy chicken disaster. Knowing what I
know now, it’s obvious that the combination of soft cheese, ample amount of
dried chili and pineapple on the same pan should’ve made the alarm bells squeal
at an ear-splitting pitch. But I knew nothing back then, and proceeded with the
culinary abomination. The results were truly criminal. Get past the plastic
texture of the rapidly congealing cheese (which wasn’t exactly easy: we’re
talking chewing gum territory here), and you were faced with either the
throat-shredding heat of an insanely generous dosage of lava-hot dried chili
flakes or the cloying sweetness of pineapple – a brilliant fruit, as it
happens, but totally the wrong guest to invite for the main meal. Even the rice
was overcooked, a lumpy, texture-free porridge where you’d need the patience of
a saint to detect where one gain started and the next began. It was embarrassing.
I was starving. Something had to change.
Soon afterwards, a copy of Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s
Dinners mysteriously appeared in the house. According to my girlfriend (now
wife), she’d found a damaged copy in the bookshop where she worked, but the suspiciously
pristine copy now makes me wonder whether it was a less than subtle strategy to
keep me in the kitchen now that I’d finally ventured near the stove, only this
time cooking something that could actually be eaten by humans (not that I would
have subjected any animals to the cruelty of having to eat that rubbery
chicken-pineapple mess). I’d seen and attempted to follow recipes before
(believe it or not, I hadn’t actually made up that evil chicken dish), but
Jamie’s stuff was different, unpretentious, easy to follow even for a totally
clueless amateur in kitchen stakes, stripped-down but, crucially, never dull.
His enthusiasm and friendly approach were contagious, even if I initially only
dared to tackle two dishes, salmon with couscous and Chinese chicken with
noodles (both of which was much recommended for cooking novices worrying about
burning down the house), over and over and over and over again, with the
results that I never want to see, smell or taste this duo ever again. But as it
turns out, that’s how you learn. You pick something you’re only moderately
scared of, use it to improve your confidence and competency, and move on to
bigger and better things.
A lot has changed since those early attempts to build
up a healthy, tasty diet. Jamie Oliver – who deserves a massive round of
applause for making cooking accessible to me and, undoubtedly, many other
hapless kitchen disasters, as such introducing me to an incredibly rewarding,
life-enhancing pastime that previously seemed totally out of my reach - has
been joined by other food heroes. I’ve made my first roast. I’ve mastered – to
an extent – Indian cooking, a definite personal favorite. I’ve finally gotten
capable enough to have a go at some fairly complex stuff from my native
Finland, introducing modern twists that mean these new versions don’t rely
entirely on my homeland’s traditional range of spices: butter, salt and lard.
I’ve even had a go at baking, something I’m still quite intimated by (all that
precision, weighing and science…scary). I used to loathe vegetables (which
showed in my pallid complexion and hefty gut), now they’re my favourites
(especially ever-versatile cabbage and its many cousins), and we can easily go
for most of the week without any meat or fish seeing the insides of our fridge.
I’ve even lost a fair bit of weight, and feel indescribably better, both
mentally and physically, a lot of which must be credited to the radical
lifestyle change my interest in cooking has brought on.
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| Summer house cooking in Finland |
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