Real Cooking is Hard

Until this school year, I was not the cook in our family. In fact, except for a few key items (a margherita pizza, chocolate chip cookies, and a handful of others), my cooking was really kind of an inside joke. Luckily when I took over during the anatomy block of med school, it turned out that I could more than handle the basics. And I'd like to preface this little entry by saying that regardless of how pathetic this may sound, I have had several much more successful experiences, including my first time ever broiling and braising something, and some awesome baked potato and butternut squash soup. So, with that disclaimer in play, here is how else I feel about cooking.

If you, like me, decided after an inspiring viewing of Julie and Julia that cooking might just be your calling in this world, or at the very least it might be FUN and EXCITING, and if you, like me, decided to set a cute little goal for yourself to learn to "really cook"--and by REALLY I mean beyond heating things, boiling pasta, and the occasional (read: yearly) foray into a new recipe--you may have by now come to the conclusion that I came to last night, the second night within the past two weeks on which some item of food nearly reduced me to tears: Real cooking is HARD.

In fact, sometimes even fake cooking is hard. See below the disastrous attempts at stir fry below, both failed in one night. On the right we have Stir Fry from Scratch failure, in which I tried to improve upon a recipe by combining it with another, somehow resulting in a mass of rice and egg-that-would-not-cook. Crushed, I attempted to heat Stir Fry from Freezer--the skillet kind that you literally put in a pan and ignore for 15 minutes. And I burned it. Seriously. We were not meant for stir fry that night.

I admit that after watching the aforementioned flick I was charmed by Streep's Julia Child, and I identified with perky, hopeful Amy Adam's portrayal of Julie Powell. I like butter. I don't like that it chubs up on my love handles. I like accomplishing things. I like writing about it. I, admittedly, like the attention that blogging occasionally gets me. I even toyed with the idea of chronicling my cooking journey via blog, but let's face it, people--I don't even update this one every day. But if you, like me, searched the web for her real life blog, you may have had the same disappointment that I did--the real Powell was decidedly less charming. She swore like a sailor. She was actually seemed kind of cranky.

And last night I encountered yet again one reason that might be: COOKING IS HARD.

Here is the long story short. I decided to make rolls from a recipe our friend Kris had totally rocked when he & Jenny had us over a while ago. Potato rolls. Starting with mashing the potato, adding buttermilk, rising, kneading, rising, etc. This was a several hour endeavor. And when it came time to form the rolls, well:

The dough was sticky and gross, and did not want to be rolls. The above is me barely faking a BAD fake smile as I tried not to burst into tears. But at least I was wearing my SWEET pajama pants. Without these I would have been desolate. I'm serious.

Oh, and right before I found out that my dough was non-roll-worthy, I found this nasty glob of over-risen yeast dough in the oven where it had risen. If you have ever cleaned up bread dough you know how sad a sight this was to me.

I thought about tossing out the dough and retreating into the dark somewhere to hate myself for a while, but instead I pioneered on through and put my shoulder to the proverbial wheel. No, actually I just sulkily dumped my dough into two bread pans, googled "how to change roll recipe bread" (I'm a geek and do not use the words that google discards in its searches, such as "a" "in" "into" and "to" when entering my phrases), lowered the temp by 25 degrees, and hoped for the best. 

BUT then a miracle occurred! For the first time in my memory, one of my attempted-flop-recoveries turned into a delicious golden brown snack. In fact, after probably about three hours of grief from these things, I finally sat down beside Steve in front of the Superbowl (miracle #2--we didn't have to watch the end!) and we enjoyed two fat slices apiece of this good stuff, topped with my dear friend butter and some tasty raspberry jam.

The End.