Thursday, April 23, 2015

Cooking isn't Necessary?

I've known how to cook a meal for myself since I was around 9 years old - that's when I learned to open a can of Baked Beans, pull over one of the dining room chairs and use the stove at my parents' house... and it was a gas stove too!

However, Mum read me an article from the Sunday Mail today which stunned me about cooking: that it's not necessary in today's world.  People are saying that they don't like cooking, they don't know how to cook and they think it's okay to be useless in the kitchen!

WHAT A CROCK OF SHIT!

I don't see anything attractive about a famous person who has a massive home, a gorgeous garden filled with herbs and vegetables and one hell of a huge kitchen and yet they have no clue how to use anything in that room.  Instead, they have a personal chef who does all the cooking for them while they're out making movies, television series or doing whatever they are doing... while us poor folks are trying to make a living from our jobs, holding together our homes and cooking our families meals.

OH! BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

I have heard from reliable sources that people I know and people in my family - as well as close friends of mine (who I won't mention online in fear of embarrassing them and myself) can't cook a simple meal to save themselves.  I mean, they try, but they just don't get how simple it is to follow a recipe in a book... and yes, I've stood by and watched a friend nearly destroy a simple vegetarian dip by putting in too much oil, instead of adding water when it got too dry halfway through.  I had to stop him and ask him what the vegetable was mainly made up of, but after he told me water, he still reached for the oil; which I confiscated until he realised what I was doing.

Now, it's not that hard, people.  

I learned Home Economics in high school.  The first 'meal' I cooked there was Savoury Mince.  It wasn't the most difficult meal, but I was about the only one in the class who didn't screw it up.  Exactly how the rest of my class did, I'm not sure.  But we did have it for dinner that night; and it wasn't bad.  I didn't burn the mince, the peas weren't hard and Mum made mashed potato to go with it.  After that, I started trying to cook other meals that weren't savoury mince; so did my brother.

When I moved out of home, I found that cooking was something that was a necessity as buying takeaway food was not only expensive, but not good for your body.  For one thing, it made my skin break out something rotten.  And secondly, the rest of my body didn't like it - I put on weight and it gave me really bad wind! 

Since moving into my own place, I've collected a huge stack of recipe books of all types and gleaned so many recipes from each of them that I've mastered, then changed just enough to make them uniquely my own... and that's the thing with cooking.  You can make any recipe completely yours by changing a few little things in it and giving one or more recipes your own twist.  

So, why are people not wanting to cook - or even wanting to learn? - I'm not sure.  However, if the public keeps going in the direction of stuffing shit in the microwave with a bit of water added, we are going to become a society who don't know anything about what happens in a kitchen - except that metal doesn't go in the microwave... and instant oats tastes like cardboard.

Well, it does to me anyway.

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