Greg Freeman: Some Of Us Need To Get Out Of Kitchen Regardless Of Heat. StL P-D 7/18/2002

Headline: SOME OF US NEED TO GET OUT OF KITCHEN REGARDLESS OF HEAT
Reporter: By Greg Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Thu., Jul. 18, 2002
Section: METRO, Page: B1, Edition: FIVE STAR

I have real admiration for people who can whip up a fancy dinner, complete with the right wine for each course.
   My admiration stems from the fact that I can't cook. Never have. It's not that I've never tried. It's just that I don't seem to have the ability for it.
   I have a friend who once had us over for an eight-course meal. He put it together all by himself, from salad to dessert, and everything in between.
   Not me. If you come to dinner at my house and I'm cooking, you'll be lucky to get peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
   I shouldn't say that I can't cook anything. I can make a mean scrambled eggs breakfast. And I can boil an egg like nobody's business. I'm not too bad at cooking bacon either, and I make a decent grilled cheese sandwich.
   But I don't go much beyond that.

My parents were good cooks. My dad could make anything from scratch, and my mother has got to be one of the best cooks in town. Even my sister is a good cook. She makes lots of vegetarian meals, getting flavors out of vegetables I never thought possible.
   Yet all my life, I've been an awful cook.
   I can remember, at about the age of 10, deciding that I would cook fried chicken and surprise the family. I surprised them, all right, when their eyes started burning and they smelled smoke. At that age, I knew nothing about coating chicken or frying it in oil. Just putting uncooked chicken on a hot skillet should have been enough to fry it, I figured. After all, it worked for bacon, didn't it? Not only did I get in trouble for nearly setting the house on fire, I also got it for ruining a perfectly good chicken.
   Still, I didn't let that deter me. When I was in college and dating the woman who would later become my wife, I decided to make her a Mexican meal. The meal came with avocado soup, something I had seen in a Mexican cookbook. I made the soup -- which turned into some sort of greenish, brownish goop -- and offered it to Elizabeth. She tried to down it, but made a face, causing my mother to tell her, "You don't have to eat that if you don't want to. He can't cook."

But I kept trying. My first year out of college, I worked for a newspaper in Pontiac, Mich., while sharing an apartment with a fellow reporter. Neither of us was much of a cook, and we usually ate at fast food places instead.
But one evening, when my fiancee was coming to visit, we decided to make a meal, complete with French bread. For once, the meal turned out all right, even if it wasn't something that Emeril would boast about. But when it came to the French bread, well, let's just say that buildings were built of softer material.
The apartment complex where we lived had geese, and we figured we'd give the uneaten French bread to them. The geese turned their beaks up to it.

Of course, being a man, there is one area where I do excel in cooking, and that's barbecuing. All men grill and barbecue. I would imagine the very first caveman -- well, at least the first one who discovered fire -- pulled out his Weber Kettle and grilled a mastodon or two. It's what men do.

My wife's a great cook. She can cook anything and do it with flair. She does a lot of experimenting in the kitchen, and the result is almost always something really good. These days, whenever I suggest making dinner, our son laughs out loud.
What's even worse is that even our son is a good cook. Being away at college, he's learned to put together all kinds of really good meals, healthy ones too. He can put together a salad to drool for.
My salads, on the other hand, usually consist of lettuce and tomatoes, covered in store-bought dressing. Clearly, as far as I'm concerned, the cooking gene skipped a generation.

A note on Tuesday's column: ... <deleted>

Daniel Schesch - Webweaver

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