Cooking

Well, since I talked about one of my loves, music, on Friday, I though I might go on a bit about one of my others, cooking.

So one of the major events of my young life was when my dad got laid off from his job when I wass around 12, and my mother was forced to go back to work fulltime. Why does this have anything to do with cooking? Previous to my mom going back to work, she made all our meals. The only food I ever made was sandwiches, which during the week meant cold cuts with mustard or Miracle Whip and on the weekend maybe something a little more elaborate like grilled cheese with ham, or maybe a fried egg sandwich with a Kraft American cheese melted on top of it.

But once Mom went back to work, she relied on my brothers and I to get dinner started before she got home. So I started to get a little bit of exposure to what cooking actually was. It might mean taking a pot out of the fridge with all the ingredients already in it, putting it on a burner, bringing it to a simmer and then leaving it on low to cook for a certain amount of time, until Mom came home to finish it. But getting dinner ready might also mean cooking pasta, heating up sauce and a vegetable, for a total of three pots - keeping a watch on all three and determining when each pot was done.

When I went off to college, all my food was prepared for me in the dining hall, so that was really a step backward. The only thing that might involve some creativity was putting together a salad and choosing the dressing. But we were allowed to rent small refrigerators for our dorm rooms, and fill them with rudimentary ingredients to get us through the time when the dining hall was not open. Yes, that was usually just sandwich meat and maybe a slice of leftover pizza, but we felt adventurous to have options in our fridges.

So it wasn't really until I set out on my own after college that I started cooking. The summer after I graduated, I spent a few weeks living with a professor, trying unsuccessfully to get a job in NYC. At the beginning I had some money to contribute to groceries, and so I would buy simple things like tv dinners but also the fixings to make omelets. I still remember what those early omelets were like. First I would get a little margarine melted in a frying pan. Then I would sautee some sliced mushrooms. Then take the mushrooms out, put in some margarine, and start the eggs cooking, throwing in the mushrooms, putting some thin pieces on cheese on, and voila! my omelet. I felt so urbane, so cultured, to be making my omelets.

Of course I could also cook pasta and heat up spaghetti sauce. And make tv dinners. So there was my repertoire! With that I got through half the summer. Then my professor kicked me out - he felt that I wasn't trying hard enough to find a job - so I went to spend another few weeks with an older friend named Jesse. Jesse taught me how to make a variety of simple dishes, like sliced up hotdogs mixed with frozen vegetables warmed up in a pan, and then tossed over rice. He also got me to make something from scratch for the first time, using a recipe: cream of mushroom soup. what a sense of accomplishment I gained from that! And he instilled in me the rule that cleaning up is an important part of any cooking! Considering I am your usual guy who frequently avoids cleaning anything like the plague, this was a revelation; but I took it to heart, and I would say to this day the area where I am most likely to do a good amount of regular cleaning is in the kitchen.

Finally at the end of the summer, still without a job, I had to admit defeat and move back in with my parents. But I got a job in a short amount of time working in a warehouse in New Jersey, and with earning my own money came buying my own food. This occasionally caused some friction, since my mom still dicated the diet for those of us who lived at home. For example, I'll never forget the first time my mom saw me put wheat germ on top of spaghetti sauce. She freaked - "you're ruining my sauce!" she said, even though "her" sauce was probably mostly from a jar. Eventually, she calmed down, and got used to the fact that I could now fend for myself pretty well now, and if I wanted to eat something different from what she was providing, I could buy it and make it.

Luckily, I saved enough money to move out of my parent's house in less than a year. I ran into a high school friend named Pedro who told me about an opening in his apartment. I jumped at the chance. There I was, living in New Brunswick, NJ with two Rutgers students and my friend, who did canvassing for a political organization. As you can imagine, it was a rather primitive setting. And frequently, I was the only one with a regular source of income. So I would take it on myself to collect whatever I could from my roommates and make a grocery run to the supermarket. My repertoire expanded to include some beatnik standards like brown rice and soy sauce and dried beans that my artsy roommates wore as banners of their membership in the counterculture.

Other than the occasional omelet, which might include bacon, I rarely ever cooked anything with meat in the apartment. This worked well, since two of my roommates were vegetarians, the first such animals I had ever studied at close range. My third roommate, ever a protagonist, took the opposite position of eating meat at every opportunity to make my veggie roomies uncomfortable. I took a position somewhere in the middle: I felt sympathetic to my vegetarian roommates sentiments, but I also loved ham sandwiches and chicken legs and bacon, and couldn't imagine going without those things. What would I eat if not meat, I thought.

So there I was, sitting on the fence. But being a vegetarian seemed to fit in with the alternative bohemian lifestyle I was affecting, so before too long I gave in and decided to give it a try. There I was, soaking blackbeans overnight so I could boil them up the next day to eat along with a pot of brown rice and some steamed broccoli. I couldn't help cheating on the diet though, especially when free food was involved. When my parents invited me to come home for dinner, I would eat chicken cacciatore and fresh ham and Swedish meatballs, and love it, without any qualms. Then when I returned to bohemian New Brunswick, I would sheepishly avoid the subject of what had been for dinner.

I became more solidified in my vegetarianism when I got my first job in New York City, and moved there as well, in early 1986. That first job was at Weiser Books, one of the most famous occult bookstores in the US, and I was their new shipping clerk. With all the spirituality and alternative living being promoted there, I encountered a number of vegetarians. And I became good friends with Ed, who as it turned out lived just down the block from me in suburban Staten Island. Ed's girlfriend Ginny actually worked in a healthfood store on Staten Island, and Ed was always bringing wonderful dishes from home for lunch, all vegetarian, and sometimes he would share with me. He was leary of me when it came to the subject of diet, though, because he could tell that it didn't take even the slightest breeze to make me bend back towards meat-eating.

My new roommates on Staten Island were very supportive of my vegetarianism. They had had a previous roommate who had been very allergic to molds, so they were used to having to segregate their food and such from others'. It did confuse them, though, when I would bring home a ham and cheese croissant from Zaro's bakery for my dinner, or accept an offer to share a meatdish that they made.

Another turning point occurred when my next job was with the same healthfood store where Ginny had been working. By then I had determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was allergic to dairy, so in addition to mostly abstaining from meat, I also wanted to abstain from dairy, which meant reading ingredients of anything that I bought in a store. Working in the health food store, Family Health Foods, made finding non-dairy alternatives easier, since most of the people who worked there were vegetarians and also abstained from dairy. In the back of the store, they had a kitchen where they would make lots of popular staples of the American diet, but altered to exclude meat and dairy. Over time, I learned how to make many of these things myself, using soy milk and tahini and nutritional yeast and ground cashews and such to make mock cheeses, and using seitan and textured vegetable protein and such to make mock meats. I got by, and instead of just rice and beans and vegetables, I could make some things that were more interesting, like mock beef stroganoff, so the experience was very empowering for me.

Tomorrow I will pick up the story in the late 1980s and bring it to today.