Welcome to Hot Stuff, a judgement-free and enthusiastic place to increase your level of comfort in the kitchen, diversify your recipe and ingredient knowledge, and fall in love with the creative expression of cooking.
It is most assuredly not a surprise to longtime GPG readers that I love cooking. Victoria and I both do, and it’s something that we’ve bonded over on many occasions, and have also bonded with friends of the newsletter, too.
Today as I was doing the dishes after preparing two separate meals for the week, I thought, my god, it is so crazy that I have to do all of this every day. Sometimes I simply forget the amount of labor I am doing on a daily basis to feed myself. And then it hits me all at once, as I stand over my sink full of dishes, rubber gloves slippery with soapy water, while I look straight ahead and my eyes unfocus for a moment and I acknowledge that I am tired.
I am much better at being compassionate with myself now than I ever have been in the past, but it’s still very hard. And so I wanted to compile some of the cooking things that have been helpful in making sure that I am able to feed myself, I am able to eat a variety of ingredients, and I am able to keep my passion for cooking alive, despite its necessity in keeping me alive.
Thus, “Hot Stuff” was born: a place where I can share my cooking philosophy with all of you. I think that the availability of recipes online is great, but I also think that SEO has ruined the way we think and talk about cooking. “Easy weeknight meals” “30 minute dinners” “Easy vegetarian meals” — these are not helpful search terms, and believe me, I search for them constantly. I started coming into my own as a cook when I ignored all the external messaging I was getting, and focused on a few key questions.
What do you like to eat?
This is actually a harder question to answer than it seems when there is a multi-billion dollar diet and weight loss industry at work every single day to shame your intrinsic food preferences, habits, traditions, desires, and choices. It is insidious, and I think acknowledging that is a really important part of remembering—or discovering!—what you like to eat. So, yes, I’m here to radicalize you.
These are some questions that I have asked myself in the past, and that I reflect on from time to time:
What do you typically order when you go out to eat?
What are childhood recipes that hold a special place in your heart?
What’s the best thing you’ve ever cooked for yourself?
What kinds of cuisines or restaurants do you repeatedly order delivery or takeout from?
What food textures are satisfying when you eat them?
Imagine coming home after a long, stressful day, and a meal is magically sitting at your dining room table, at the perfect temperature, waiting to be eaten: what is that meal?
These questions are all positive, because I think coming in with an abundance mindset is crucial to growing more confident as a cook. Instead of focusing on the things you don’t like to eat, can't eat, or don’t know how to cook, just focus on the wealth of ingredients and opportunities in front of you. Don’t let your lack of current skill stop you from imagining the food you want to make for yourself!
What is your level of comfort with cooking?
One of the most challenging aspects of being a home cook is trying to find recipes that you like to eat that are also within your comfort level in the kitchen. I say comfort level, because I don’t think that cooking has clearly defined levels of expertise. What’s easy for me might be hard for you, and vice versa. And I think there is a pretty pervasive myth that there is a black-and-white divide between being a “good” cook or a “bad” cook—even professional chefs have recipes or techniques or ingredients that they can’t figure out how to cook, so they just avoid them!
When I first started cooking for myself, I would never cook a new recipe on a weeknight. It was too stressful for me to have to use brain power on a brand new thing after working. The weekends were my time to try and experiment with recipes that were new and exciting to me. As I’ve grown more comfortable in the kitchen over time, I know what kinds of recipes I can dive into on a weeknight, even if they are new. It takes time to develop any skill, and cooking is definitely a skill. This is why I will die on the hill that “Quick and Easy Weeknight Recipes” do not fucking EXIST—they are assuming TOO MUCH about the person who is cooking them!
So, when it comes to assessing your level of comfortability in the kitchen, instead of thinking about recipes as a whole, think about how comfortable you are with each individual component, which can range quite a bit for everyone:
Cooking pasta, rice, or other grains like quinoa and barley
Chopping, dicing, peeling, grating, or shredding ingredients
Roasting and baking
Sautéing or stir-frying
Grilling, searing, or pan-frying
What ingredients are you familiar with?
What cuisines are you familiar with?
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to start. If you’ve never done one of these things before, and it’s a main component of a specific recipe? Maybe save that for your day off. Focus on recipes that utilize techniques that you understand and feel capable of doing with minimal stress. Also, personal preferences have a lot to do with this too: I love chopping vegetables, it feels productive and therapeutic. I have very limited experience working with meat and fish, so recipes that call for those ingredients stress me out a lot. Everyone is different!
What dish do you want to learn how to make?
Two years after I graduated college, I got a new job and moved to Madison, Wisconsin. I was surrounded by the highest quality cheese in the land. I was feeling newly invigorated post-move, and wanted to become someone who could reliably make something delicious from scratch, which felt very grown-up and classy. So I chose my fighter: baked mac and cheese.
Of course, I had eaten and loved Kraft mac and cheese as a kid. I’ve learned about 80% of what I know about cooking from my mom, and my mom did not make casseroles or baked dishes of any kind—we were staunchly a soup/stew family, not a casserole/hot dish family—so the concept of mac and cheese in an oven was completely foreign to me. I decided it would become my “signature” meal.
So I looked up a recipe. The first one I ever made was from Alton Brown, and I watched a video of him making a roux, hyper-focusing on the color that the butter/flour mixture was supposed to be. My first attempt was decent, but the flavor was off—it still tasted bland and kind of like raw flour. I found an article about the “Dos and Don’ts” of making roux, and realized that if you don’t let the flour get toasty and cook down enough before going on to the next ingredient, the final result can still taste like flour. So, I made it again. And again. And again.
Over the past eight years, I have made countless dishes of baked mac and cheese. I’ve used caramelized onion white cheddar cheese and spinach, I’ve used Buffalo cheddar cheese and my one true love, Frank’s Red Hot Buffalo sauce. I’ve made non-dairy versions, I’ve made full dairy versions, I’ve made every combination in between. What I didn’t realize was that in the process of fine tuning my single “signature” dish, I was actually learning how to perfect a variety of skills: making a roux, making a successful cheese sauce from a roux, knowing how long to parboil pasta before putting it in the oven, knowing what sauce-to-pasta ratio was ideal, finding good substitutes for a variety of ingredients and spices, and figuring out what vegetables and other flavors would go well on the blank canvas of noodles.
So, the best way to begin expanding your comfort level and skill set in the kitchen, in my experience, is to pick a recipe that you want to spend some time getting to know. Of course, you are allowed to make other recipes—I didn’t eat baked mac and cheese for 8 years straight although you know damn well I could have! But essentially, I created an apprenticeship program for myself: I found a dish that I kept coming back to, kept eating, enjoying, and immediately being inspired about what I could do to make it “even better” next time. That process was immensely satisfying, and now I have a really great foundation for further culinary exploration.
Have a cooking question? Send it on over to goldplatedgirls@gmail.com and it could be incorporated into the next installment of Hot Stuff.