I’m not a good cook in any complete sense. I’ve never been to a cooking school and there are huge gaps in my skills and knowledge. I’m a dilettante; I learn what interests me and get as good as I can at it. There are some things I wanted to master and I did them over and over and over again and got very good. There are some other really basic things I’m no good at. I check something off when I’m consistently successful at it.
This week I hit the target conclusively on marinara sauce, shellfish cookery, and mesquite-smoked meat cooked on a charcoal grill. Those had all been long journeys of improvement, especially the last one.
I recently hit my groove with omelets so they now come out just about perfect every time. The same is true for stir-fried eggplant. About a year ago I got most fish cookery, at least sautéeing, poaching, and baking, to a routine. I can also roast a chicken and get consistent results.
Two years ago I “arrived” with potato salad, stirfried green beans, cornbread, basic curry sauce, pot roast, ginger/molasses carrots, barbecue type sauces, and a slew of salads mostly with garlic or beets or cabbage or all of those in them.
It’s time to make another list of things to learn.
Be My Blog 
Dude I am so going to visit you and you are so going to feed me. TIME FOR MAN CHEESE
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Marinara sauce?!
T SUBSTITUTE STARTCOOKINIMCOMINGOVERNOWSPLASH
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Food
Foods to master and to elaborate, in order of increasing difficulty:
<a href=
“http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/prose/Ralph_Baccash_-_Easy_Hummus.html”
>hummus
red beans and rice
banh mi and/or <a href=
“http://www.gumbopages.com/food/samwiches/”
>poboys
<a href=
“http://gumbopages.com/recipe-page.html”
>everything else here!
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Deep Fried Snickers Bars!! Actually if you could figure out how to make the perfectly round deep fried hush puppy, that would be something.
I think you should post your recipe methods on a website.
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“I ain’t bin to no cookin’ school! I ain’t nobody’s fool!”
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I love to grill–I often find myself grilling baby-back ribs with my own dry rub, or grilling asparagus, fennel, zuchini, yellow squash, etc.
One simple recipe I came up with for butternut squash soup … all amounts are approximate, as I rarely measure anything …
1 squash, cut in half
sprinkle enough brown sugar, cinnamon and anise seed on the cut side of each squash half
cover baking tray with aluminum foil, place squashes cut side down on foil
bake in oven at 375F until skin is loose and flesh is soft
remove from oven, scoop squash flesh out, discard skin
puree squash flesh with hand-blender, adding 1/2 pint of heavy cream
This leaves you with a thick and tasty orange soup. I have yet to find someone who didn’t love it.
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it seems to me that you know how to cook much more than the average person does, and well! you have a certain knack for choosing delicious sounding stuff to prepare.
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