Bitchin’ Kitchen

If you’re anything like me – you avoided the kitchen as a child, your subconscious making you extra clumsy so you’d break stuff and get kicked out by your mother. Or you’d suddenly remember you had a paper to write or get a phone call just when you were about to get your hands dirty and conveniently end it when it was time to eat. As a student/young working professional, you would rather eat out than make anything at home claiming that it was cheaper for one person anyway. But as you got older you realized it was kinda lame that you didn’t know how to cook anything and like it or not it was affecting your budget. Plus, all that takeout was starting to taste the same…

It’s never too late start learning to cook, but there are a few elements that need to be in place.

Three steps to being a good cook:

1. You have to want to cook! If you don’t want to be in the kitchen – the kitchen will know and perform witchcraft and curse you. You will inevitably mess up eggs. Or cereal.

2. It helps to have someone to cook for that you care about. I don’t care enough about myself to spend an hour making something that takes 10 minutes to eat. But making something for that special someone is always great motivation.

3. You have to want to eat what you’re making. If you’re making something just cause it’s dinner time and need to use up the broccoli before it goes bad but are definitely not feeling the broccoli – your dish will end up in the trash and you will end up hungry.

I guess that all of these elements can be reduced to one – love. I know it sounds cheesy (mind the pun) but love really is the secret ingredient and you can taste it in your food. Resentment is a pretty strong flavour and will overpower any other ingredient in your dish. Like that 8 hour pork roast you didn’t want to make to begin with. I hated that chunk of meat and it knew it.

Superfora tip: A great place to get inspiration for dishes (and one of my new favourite websites) is allrecipes.com. You can type in ingredients that you want or just happen to have in your kitchen and it will produce a list of recipes with those ingredients. I heart. And my stomach does too.