Simple, Quick, Delicious!: Why Cook it Yourself?

My nephew Jeffery is a grown man now, and he recently gave me a great idea. He and many of his friends entered adulthood without simple cooking skills. He doesn't want to study at the Culinary Institute of America, he wants to learn how to cook a Grilled Cheese Sandwich without filling his kitchen with smoke. He knew I could help because I've been a Cook in some great restaurants and loved cooking all my life. I'm also able to get my point across quickly and clearly, in an entertaining way.
So I took out my GoPro HD Camera and started rolling.

Doug at the Stove

The first videos got a good response, so I fine-tuned my presentation style and tweeked a few things. Then I showed them to Jeffery and got constructive feedback, acted on it, picked the brains of his non-cooking peers to learn what they would like to learn to cook, and made more videos. It's been great fun!

As a kid, I spent time in the kitchen with my Mom, (I call her Mumsy sometimes as if we're aristocrats), who had been a Home Economics teacher when she was younger. She taught me the basics and gave me a love for all things Culinary. She introduced me to The Joy of Cooking. (My favorite passage: a little boy at Thanksgiving Dinner politely explaining, "No more turkey for me, but I'll have some more of that bread he ate.") She gifted me with a KitchenAid Mixer. She taught me her recipes and we shared many a magic moment.

When I became a professional Cook in my late teens, I would use her subscription to Gourmet Magazine to find unique recipes, upscale them and make them part of the Lunch Buffet at The Flaming Pit, an Ann Arbor restaurant that was near Arborland. I remember the Buffet became quite popular under my reign, using recipes like "Nevada Annie's Cowboy Chili" and "Mumsy's Beef Pinwheels with Mushroom Sauce".

I never went to the CIA, and never made Cooking my career, (I worked on the assembly line at Ford, then started my own business serving the automakers, then had to close it when the automakers hit hard times). I fell back on Cooking for a job and remembered how much I knew about it, and how much I loved making people happy by making something delicious.

My unique experiences resulted in my love of cooking, and when you love something, you give it your full attention. I don't expect you've had similar experiences or you'd know a lot about cooking and wouldn't be interested in Simple, Quick, Delicious tutorials. You'd be following blogs about exotic recipes. A Grilled Cheese Sandwich is delicious, the most over-paid food snob would have to concede, but it has no Culinary status. You just want dinner, not to qualify for the Food Snobbery Guild. I call bullshit. (I can teach you to induce "Foodgasms" that have the same intensity as Rachael Ray's.) We're going to teach you to feed yourself, to fend for yourself when the spouse is awol, to stand on your own two feet and man up and surprise everyone, most of all yourself, by learning to cook simple, quick and delicious food, and we'll have fun doing it!

1 comment:

UnknownJanuary 12, 2020 at 7:45 PM
Dale Conlin at fb.
CDN Conlin from Wellington County, Guelph Ont.
Shark Mentality on youtube.

Immigrated to Grand Blanc, MI early 70's,
spent time at South Quad at University in A squared.
Have a few funny, interesting stories about being an (unrelated) Conlin in Ann Arbor in the 70's and 80's.
daleconlin@gmail.com
Good Luck with a realitor, selling parents
Condo.

Dale

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Why Cook it Yourself?

1 comment: