disaster chef December 14, 2011

I don't even know what half of those utensils are.

Now when I say I can’t cook, I mean I REALLY can’t cook. I live on grilled cheese, boiled eggs, frozen garlic bread and food cooked by other people. I’ve tried to cook. I made a curry once in the slow cooker and it tasted like the bottom of the fridge. When I cook rice it goes all hard and sticky and coats the saucepan so stubbornly you have to hack at it with the blunt end of a knife to get it off. Sometimes I get all nutrition-minded and make steamed chicken and salad, which is about as far as I can culinarily venture without killing myself and/or others.

This wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t obsessed with food. I love to eat and I love to eat things that are almost as hard to cook as they are to say out loud. When I go to my parents’ house we put on the Lifestyle Food Channel and I happily watch people like Rick Stein and Maggie Beer and Nigella Lawson doing things I’ll never be able to do in the kitchen and I comfort myself with an inner monologue like this: it’s okay Emma you’re only 24 and you don’t even have a husband or children and you only really need to worry about knowing how to cook the day you find out you’re knocked up because kids need to eat and you can’t bring up a child on frozen garlic bread no matter how freaking delicious it is. Then my mother says that I have a weird look on my face and am I ok and I reply with yes but sssh the guy on Choccywoccydoodah is making a 50 KILOGRAM CHOCOLATE REINDEER which is why I love this show even though it has the most ridiculous name of all time. My dad sits and watches these conversations with a baffled look on his face and wishes he’d had more sons.

ANYWAY, the point is I wish I knew how to make delicious food. I wish I knew how to fillet a fish. I wish I knew how to make Rogan Josh not from a jar. I wish I had a little herb garden on my windowsill and chopped fresh thyme into my pasta sauce that I am making on the spur of the moment because I just happen to have a fridge stocked with Atlantic salmon and crème fraiche. Does thyme even go with that recipe? Is thyme even existent outside of Simon and Garfunkel? What even is thyme? I wouldn’t know; I just have garlic salt and something called Mixed Herb Pizza Seasoning that tastes like the shit on Pizza Shapes and goes wonderfully with everything I cook which is not surprising because everything I cook is melted-cheese-related.

And why do I want to know how to cook? Aside from the fact that eating is fantastic and I’d love to be able to do it all the time without having to get dressed and leave the house, it’s IMPRESSIVE. How much more impressive is “come over for dinner, I’m making lobster bisque” than “come over”? I mean, my supposed natural endowments should be enough to impress without needing to hurl gourmet dishes at a man until he relents and goes to bed with me. Whatever God gave me, it’s never let me down yet. I just feel as though I’d be EVEN MORE impressive if I could cook something with more than three ingredients.

I shouldn’t worry. It’s not the 1950s anymore. (Incidentally, can you imagine me in the 1950s? My debonair husband would come home from work at the advertising firm to a messy house and 2.5 snotty-nosed children with the weird combination of my jaw and his lips and I would be standing in the kitchen sobbing over a collapsed soufflé and there would be some kind of batter all over the walls and flour on my face and he would stand there in his suit and pomaded hair and RUE THE DAY HE MET THIS INCOMPETENT DEMON OF A HOUSEWIFE and then just as he is about to break the ice and suggest we go to his mother’s which I don’t want to do because I swear that bitch hates me the fruitcake in the oven that I had completely forgotten about spontaneously combusts and our house explodes and falls in flakes of ash on the sleepy neighbourhood and all the people come out and hold their hands palm-up to the sky and wonder why it’s snowing failed marriage.) But it doesn’t matter because if I really need to use food as a weapon I can always order high-quality takeaway, dirty up a couple of pans and woks and pile them on the sink for authenticity, and have a steaming plate of Peking Duck or some other such food that I could never realistically cook or even afford to eat waiting on the table. Or I could just order Domino’s and put on Master Chef and suggest that we try and merge our sensory receptors and pretend that what we’re seeing is what we’re eating which is what I do because then low-grade pizza miraculously transforms into a magical feast in your mouth. I LOVE TELEVISION.