Erin Can't Bake No Mo
Nov. 8th, 2010 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losSo I called my mom and grandma to get a main dish that goes well with corn bread (it couldn't be chili or ham). Both suggested essentially the same whole chicken recipe, and despite being nervous about whole chicken, which I very seldom cook, I went for it.
I spent HOURS cooking? Man, that chicken turned out so mediocre. /Thanks/ mom. Secret recipe inDEED
Essentially I was just cooking a chicken rubbed with spices, with white wine and garlic cloves, celery, onions and carrots around it, on low for two hours under tinfoil, and then broiling it with butter/garlic oil on top so it crisps up while remaining juicy? SOUNDS okay, but actually tastes: like it's never met a spice. And the gravy you make from the wine will taste: sugary and weird. The 'crispy' basting was: weaksauce. It got nicely golden, and STILL tasted of /fuck all/. The butter, the garlic oil applied to crisp it up? for nothing! Waste of hoooours.
Next time, cook book. At least now I know my mom's 'just wing it' food is made of fail, and to never let anyone pry the cookbook from my cold dead hands--if I /know/ a cooking method or a food, I'm great with improvising, but if I don't I tend to flail. I think you have to have a really SOLID understanding of something to be able to fuck around. And like, whole chicken? I don't often work with it.
Meat is /so different/ in different countries--just, the properties change. The level of fat, how it cooks, the flavor, etc.
Cooking in England is at times intensely frustrating. The ingredients I expect to be common are impossible to find, the measuring system trips me up, things are named differently or come in different, non-equivocal forms--I've been nearly ready to throw a Devil's Food Emergency Birthday Cake off the balcony after a series of disasters, chief among which is that 'yogurt' turns out to mean /intensely/ different things in different countries.
On the days that I am nearly crying because on top of other stresses, when I realize, in succession, that it is IMPOSSIBLE to
a) buy a tin of refried beans,
b) buy a can of black beans to make refried beans WITH, or even
c) buy a bag of /raw/ black beans,
and spend 20 minutes debating with myself whether these small, dark so-called 'cow peas' are just black beans getting above themselves (protip: no, they're black-eyed peas having an identity crisis--I don't know why there were so dark in the store), I really need to remember that, eventually, I will become as capable of cooking here as I was back home--more so, as I age.
It's just something like losing years worth of experience and knowledge of how things work. This is generally true, but cooking--typically a source of safety, competence and joy, has taken a real hit--becoming this irritating shame and anxiety laden thing as money comes in unevenly and things I thought I had down slip away from me. That loss of ability is incredibly frustrating. I'd only bombed a cake one in my life before (a blue 'red' velvet for Therese's birthday, sophomore year--too dry, texture like box-cornbread, not even the cream cheese icing could enliven it--still annoyed about it)--I don't know how many times I've fucked up in England. Chili with accidental use of the strange little peppers that were the only ones the shop had, and looked harmless, like something I recognized, and turned out to *actually* be Scotch Bonnets (I'd never actually seen the fearsomely fiery beasties before), the mighty Devil's Food Failcake--you name it, it's flopped.
Eventually, though, with enough trial and error (its frustrating to realize this is unavoidable, and even a totally necessary means of growth), I'll learn to make my food here, and even make progress on that front. My sister's pizza dough came out well. Katy quite liked my first attempt at slow-cooked barbacoa, and the chiles rellenos. Rosh Hashanah supper was a triumph of tizimmes and honey cake with apples. These were all things I'd never made before England.
And I'll learn to make their food. Despite cliches about English cooking, I find the standard of ingredients and prepared food available to be much higher here, and in general reasonably priced, even in the capitol--more so than in New York. The cuisine itself has a lot of strong points--the sticky, dense puddings, the airy scones, the reassuringly frumpy delights of the Yorkshire pudding. On the English front, I made Tamara a really successful bangers-and-mash with gravy and green beans Thursday night, and I'm v. excited about the upcoming Christmas dishes. There's a very different palate of ethnic cuisine available, and I've made quite a few successful curries, which I would never have attempted at home. The Chinese dumplings effort is, as yet, imperfect, but coming along.
I feel like, as a white American moving to Europe, I don't have a legitimate immigrant experience, but in some ways these *are* real pressures and aggravations (if nothing to those of some others). It is a work in progress, and it has not been altogether easy or pleasant, but I am confident that I can eventually work the rough spots smooth.
I spent HOURS cooking? Man, that chicken turned out so mediocre. /Thanks/ mom. Secret recipe inDEED
Essentially I was just cooking a chicken rubbed with spices, with white wine and garlic cloves, celery, onions and carrots around it, on low for two hours under tinfoil, and then broiling it with butter/garlic oil on top so it crisps up while remaining juicy? SOUNDS okay, but actually tastes: like it's never met a spice. And the gravy you make from the wine will taste: sugary and weird. The 'crispy' basting was: weaksauce. It got nicely golden, and STILL tasted of /fuck all/. The butter, the garlic oil applied to crisp it up? for nothing! Waste of hoooours.
Next time, cook book. At least now I know my mom's 'just wing it' food is made of fail, and to never let anyone pry the cookbook from my cold dead hands--if I /know/ a cooking method or a food, I'm great with improvising, but if I don't I tend to flail. I think you have to have a really SOLID understanding of something to be able to fuck around. And like, whole chicken? I don't often work with it.
Meat is /so different/ in different countries--just, the properties change. The level of fat, how it cooks, the flavor, etc.
Cooking in England is at times intensely frustrating. The ingredients I expect to be common are impossible to find, the measuring system trips me up, things are named differently or come in different, non-equivocal forms--I've been nearly ready to throw a Devil's Food Emergency Birthday Cake off the balcony after a series of disasters, chief among which is that 'yogurt' turns out to mean /intensely/ different things in different countries.
On the days that I am nearly crying because on top of other stresses, when I realize, in succession, that it is IMPOSSIBLE to
a) buy a tin of refried beans,
b) buy a can of black beans to make refried beans WITH, or even
c) buy a bag of /raw/ black beans,
and spend 20 minutes debating with myself whether these small, dark so-called 'cow peas' are just black beans getting above themselves (protip: no, they're black-eyed peas having an identity crisis--I don't know why there were so dark in the store), I really need to remember that, eventually, I will become as capable of cooking here as I was back home--more so, as I age.
It's just something like losing years worth of experience and knowledge of how things work. This is generally true, but cooking--typically a source of safety, competence and joy, has taken a real hit--becoming this irritating shame and anxiety laden thing as money comes in unevenly and things I thought I had down slip away from me. That loss of ability is incredibly frustrating. I'd only bombed a cake one in my life before (a blue 'red' velvet for Therese's birthday, sophomore year--too dry, texture like box-cornbread, not even the cream cheese icing could enliven it--still annoyed about it)--I don't know how many times I've fucked up in England. Chili with accidental use of the strange little peppers that were the only ones the shop had, and looked harmless, like something I recognized, and turned out to *actually* be Scotch Bonnets (I'd never actually seen the fearsomely fiery beasties before), the mighty Devil's Food Failcake--you name it, it's flopped.
Eventually, though, with enough trial and error (its frustrating to realize this is unavoidable, and even a totally necessary means of growth), I'll learn to make my food here, and even make progress on that front. My sister's pizza dough came out well. Katy quite liked my first attempt at slow-cooked barbacoa, and the chiles rellenos. Rosh Hashanah supper was a triumph of tizimmes and honey cake with apples. These were all things I'd never made before England.
And I'll learn to make their food. Despite cliches about English cooking, I find the standard of ingredients and prepared food available to be much higher here, and in general reasonably priced, even in the capitol--more so than in New York. The cuisine itself has a lot of strong points--the sticky, dense puddings, the airy scones, the reassuringly frumpy delights of the Yorkshire pudding. On the English front, I made Tamara a really successful bangers-and-mash with gravy and green beans Thursday night, and I'm v. excited about the upcoming Christmas dishes. There's a very different palate of ethnic cuisine available, and I've made quite a few successful curries, which I would never have attempted at home. The Chinese dumplings effort is, as yet, imperfect, but coming along.
I feel like, as a white American moving to Europe, I don't have a legitimate immigrant experience, but in some ways these *are* real pressures and aggravations (if nothing to those of some others). It is a work in progress, and it has not been altogether easy or pleasant, but I am confident that I can eventually work the rough spots smooth.
