the artlessness of cooking

After several summers of dabbling at stir-fry, I’m still below par at making a dish actually taste good. There aren’t really good instructions for stir-frying. Of course, recipes can tell you how much oil to put in, when to put in the other ingredients, etc. etc., but it’s much more complicated than that.

Having grown up in a family that does very minimal stir-frying where pepper, salt, and spring onions are frequently the only condiments, there’s an art involved. The first step is one that I get wrong a fair amount of time: how much oil to put in. I’ve experimented, but I do think that I don’t put in enough. I see stir-frying as a balance between oil and water. You need some oil to get the vegetables jump started, then the natural water in the vegetables should take care of the rest (helped along by a liberal dose of salt). The problem with not putting in enough oil is that the vegetables can start burning before the water comes out.

After observing my dad, I see that he usually puts in tomato or tofu in whatever he’s cooking. It prevents the problem of drying out. The amusing part is that we use the same ingredients and roughly cook the same way, but his food and mine tastes radically different. It’s as if the molecules in his food are dancing and skating, and mine are just limping along.

Usually, I don’t even venture into the realm of meat because it’s so mysterious to me. Besides the standard salt and pepper, there’s the additional cooking wine and soy sauce. That baffles me because once again, I don’t know how much to add of each. Add too little and the meat is undercooked and flavorless besides. Add too much and I get something the consistency of leather. No, I haven’t graduated to the meat stage yet.

I have tried other meals besides stir-fry with varying degrees of success. Chicken pot pie is something that turns out fairly consistently each time. A few months ago, I tried spaghetti carbonera, Sicilian pasta, gnocchi, and other Italian dishes. Everything was rather heavy and not all good (especially the gnocchi). I attribute my 50% success rate to not enough experience in the kitchen.

I love staring at all of the cookbooks in my house, especially the ones with scrumptious desserts. Maybe in another life, I was a five-star chef. In this life, I can’t be bothered to invest the time learning how to cook well. For the past week or so, I’ve subsisted on cereal, whole wheat bread, eggs, bacon, and instant noodles. It’s a diet that will probably take years off of my life. Since I would have spent those years actually cooking, that’s fine with me.