By Bill Buchanan
For someone who loves good food, I am a lousy cook. I am not talking about not quite good enough to have my own show on the Food Network, or pretty good, but not quite gourmet. I am talking about the level of sad where you have to call your wife to ask how to boil eggs or sauté shrimp. I am talking about buying cold water tea bags because you don’t trust yourself to make it hot. I am reminded of just how bad a cook I am at every lunch and every supper — either by enjoying something delicious that someone else has prepared at one of Ojai’s many fine restaurants, or by eating my own lousy cooking. The other night I was slapped hard in the face with this realization when I heated up the wonderful gumbo and rice that Claire Clark brought over to the office last week. Miss Claire, who is Mark Weil’s mother, is from south Louisiana, home of the best cooking in the free world. The first time Mark and I met, he mentioned he was from New Orleans. It is practically impossible to have a conversation about New Orleans without talking about food. So naturally we started talking about south Louisiana cuisine and he mentioned how good his mama’s gumbo was. A few weeks later, I ran into Mark and his family and shamelessly proceeded to beg Miss Claire to save some gumbo for me the next time she made it.
And, bless her heart, she did, and it was terrific.
Food in south Louisiana has been elevated to an art form. I thought people took cooking seriously where I grew up, but when I lived in south Louisiana, food was taken to a whole new level. Down there, you are safer insulting a man’s mama than you are denigrating his recipe for jambalaya. The cooks there are creative and unafraid to spice something within an inch of its life. They also cook and eat things that people in most states would kill and throw in the trash. But they make all it taste wonderful. My wife Ava was always a good cook, but she really flourished when we moved down by New Orleans.
Even though I lived in the center of the culinary universe for three years, none of the magic rubbed off on me. My recipe repertoire pretty much consists of soup le Campbell’s de tomato; re-heated rotisserie chicken ala supermarket with baked potato du microwave; tuna chez Star-Kist; and baloney en croute.
Whenever I attempt anything much fancier than the pathetic list above it usually comes out tasting like burning hair. If grease fires count, then it can be said that I did flambé some chicken a time or two —- but certainly not intentionally. I also fried some dragonfly once, but only because it flew through my kitchen window and landed in the middle of the skillet while I was frying some chicken. It looked very interesting, and I was almost hungry enough to eat it, but elected to toss the blackened dragonfly along with the chicken into the trash.
Part of the problem is that while I have always shown a remarkable interest in eating I just don’t have much interest in cooking. I do not possess the creativity necessary to be a good cook. Great cooks study foods, experiment with different combinations of foods and spices. I do not have the patience for this. One of my favorite cartoons (perhaps because it really hits home) was of a little guy on his knees with his fingers steepled, looking upward. The caption read: “Lord, last night I asked you for patience — what’s the hold-up!” I just want to toss something in a pan and be eating five minutes later —- yet have it be delicious. I guess it doesn’t work that way.
Another deterrent to my becoming a master chef is that Ava is a terrific cook. So there is no compelling reason for me to be in the kitchen, and my presence there is usually just an annoyance —- unless I am helping her clean up.
So now, the times when I am in Ojai and Ava is not with me and I have to fend for myself, it would be nice if I were a little better cook. A few weeks ago, I ran into Joy Grove at the grocery store. She looked in my cart, and remarked on how much wine it held. I replied, “If you had to eat my cooking, you’d make sure you had plenty of wine first, too.”
Maybe I’ll start going out to dinner more.
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