Cupcakes 24/7 and the Jetsons

 Cooking  2 Responses »
Mar 192012
 

I fantasize about cooking like the Jetsons do: with the press of a button.

I love to eat but hate to cook, which is a sad situation to be in three times a day. Nothing about the kitchen calls to me—except for occasional baking binges involving cookie cutters and multicolored frosting. In fact, I once remodeled a perfectly good kitchen into a library with a stove.

Perhaps that is why I am intrigued by the Sprinkles Cupcake ATM. Behind its pink doors are freshly baked cupcakes in a variety of flavors courtesy of Sprinkles Cupcakes. Select your flavor de jour, slip in your credit card, and a robotic arm goes to work retrieving your personal box of bakery bliss. The door slides open and voilà. Munchies satisfied—George Jetson style—any time of the day or night.

The cupcake automat also taps some vein of guilt in me. For each passing year, I sneak farther and farther away from my primal beginnings as chief cook and bottle washer. How did I get like this? I come from women who were fearless in the kitchen. My mother, a self-taught cook, loved to experiment with recipes. My grandmother twisted the heads off chickens, for God’s sake.

I rose from a stew of women’s lib, the invention of the microwave, and the proliferation of preservatives—a woman with no burning desire to separate poultry from its head.

Somewhere along the line, without really meaning to, I abdicated the kitchen. Maybe it started when my partner, Rubbertoes, began preparing the occasional meal. Maybe it was when I insisted that my children make their own school lunches. (I reasoned that if I had to shop for it, they could at least toss it in a lunch bag.)

My mother-in-law used to say one of the things she admired about me was my talent for abdication when it came to cooking. This was not possible for a woman of her generation raising seven children in the fifties.

Once she came over for dinner and teased my four-year-old daughter that it was “her turn to cook tonight.”

My daughter replied, “But, Grandma, I can’t drive.”

I think of the cupcake ATM and wonder: if I owned such technology, what would I want my own personal automat to do? Put chocolate chips in my pancakes. Make sure there was always a fresh salad tossed and ready to eat. Peel my oranges in the morning. Know about a million things to do with potatoes. Bake bread, of course. And I haven’t even thought about the drink menu.

I am not alone in my automat envy. I know other women who, like me, get bored just warming up leftovers, who would rather read than cook, and who are thankful to have men in their lives who make a mean chocolate chip pancake.

It has become obvious to me that to cook well one must care. And it has taken me many years to be able to admit that I don’t care about cooking.

I wonder if Judy Jetson ever felt this way, if she stubbornly crossed her arms, and insisted that George press that button on the food processor. If he did, his lobster thermidor probably came out alive and pinching his nose. Those are the kinds of things that happen to George.

I understand. That is the way I cook, too—everything comes out like a sit-com—so it is better that I not try at all. Besides I’m in the middle of this great book.

___________________

Give me a shout: What would you like to have in your own personal automat? Or has one of your meals ever turned out like a situation comedy?

Bet Hemingway Was a Whiz in the Kitchen

 Cooking, Writing  2 Responses »
Jan 092012
 

The last cake I baked drifted out of the pan as if it were an angel descending, settled on the platter, and promptly split down the middle. The fissure was about the size of the Grand Canyon. Since it was a birthday cake and, thus, not expendable, I made repairs. It takes a lot of frosting to fill the Grand Canyon.

I am used to such misadventures; they do not faze me. My husband says these things would not happen if: 1) I read more in the kitchen (as in Julia Child or Betty Crocker), or 2) I didn’t read as much (as in Hemingway or Steinbeck).

But why should I read cookbooks when I am such a marvelous cook to begin with?

I can boil down sentences until there is only the essence left, the true flavor of the words. They cling delicately to the bone of meaning and taste full and round in the mouth. They form such vivid images you can almost bite into them and feel their juices running down your chin.

A good story takes some preparation. Call it marinating. True, there are a few storytellers, such as Garrison Keillor, who pop out stories like microwave ovens. But I, and probably most other writers, take a while to collect information and ideas. After I gather the ingredients, I throw them into a pan, cover them with sauce from the subconscious, and wait.

Sometimes, I wait for years. Good cooking cannot be rushed.

Even after I have made the story, I must wait, let it simmer, let it age. For a story made today has a different taste tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that. Good writing, work studied and hailed and read over and over again, never loses its taste, never goes sour.

Of course, errors do happen. I forget to add a thought. Or I beat an idea instead of folding it in with gentleness and patience. Or I sprinkle in too many adjectives, and the story becomes not only runny but run on.

The best cooks never follow the book as if it were a drill sergeant. They improvise, feeling their way by taste and touch and sound. With practice, you get to know what will work; you have a sense of what the story needs, when it is missing a pinch of this or a dash of that.

And, of course, I have burned things. Everyone does. Cooks on scaffolds building skyscrapers, cooks in operating rooms navigating jungles of tiny veins. Cooks speaking before juries, exploring the ocean deep, patrolling lonely city streets. They make mistakes, but they don’t give up. They go right back and beat that steel beam again, cut out that diseased organ, flambé their opponents’ arguments.

Nothing is more disheartening than to hear someone cry: “I can’t cook.” Nonsense, everyone can cook. We all have our specialties, and none is greater or less than others. We all have some dish inside us with our name on it. Sometimes, we just forget to look for it. We let people sidetrack us. Categorize us. We don’t listen to our hearts.

I say get out your pots and pans and descend into the Grand Canyon. I hear the view is stunning.