Cooking

 I love to prepare food and cook it.  I find it satisfying to do the knifework, plan the timing, handle the food, and then eat it (and preparing food and eating it are two different pleasures).  I don't know exactly when that started, but I remember being in the kitchen as a young teenager.  Mom listened to Broadway musicals and that probably lured me in to start.  But I've always enjoyed good food.  

So when I asked "can I help?" I got a few minor jobs.  Peel potatoes and carrots.  Mash the potatoes.  Watch the timer.  Eventually, I got to actually cut some veggies.  I got better at stuff.  

It's not like I liked it better than a lot of other activities (golfing, bowling, building simple wood stuff, HO trains, Marvel comic books, reading sci-fi), but it was one.  And both Mom and I enjoyed classical and Broadway music.

I had always been the primary dish-washer (being eldest child) and baby-sat the younger siblings (being eldest child).  But one of the pleasures of baby-sitting was that I was also trusted to make a simple dinner at 12 (Chung King Chicken Chow Mein in the old double cans was my favorite, being easy to manage).

I was a Boy Scout.  And I had this idea that a guy should be able to do anything it took to get by day-to-day.  I would have taken Home Economics in school, but that was reserved for girls (guys took wood-working shop) back then (mid 60s).

I came across a funny phrase back then; "If you like bacon, you have to get down in the mud and keep the hogs happy".  Meaning, if you want something, you have to be able to do it yourself.  I liked good food.

I've probably mentioned this before (you blog long enough and you can repeat yourself) but Mom was a very average cook and seldom met a vegetable that couldn't be boiled for too long.  When I discovered stir-frying and steaming later it really opened my eyes to food.

In college, I earned money and/or free meals by cooking sweet&sour pork for other guy's cheap dates in the dorm rec room.  

There's a slight story behind that.  Male dorms never had stovetops in the rec rooms.  Female dorms did.  In 1969, the Univ of MD arranged for a coed dorm by application and approval.  I was approved.  WOW, there was a stovetop (and a bathtub in the shower room BTW).  

Well, I had nothing to cook WITH, so I took a job selling cookware.  Great stuff.  Stainless steel inside and out with a layer of copper in between for heat diffusion.  But if you sold one set, you got to keep the sales kit.  I sold one set and quit and had a full set of cookware that was worth a year's tuition!

So I was able to cook meals at the new coed dorm.  I told the other guys in the dorm that I could cook sweet&sour pork.  The cost was either $5 above ingredient cost or I would buy enough to feed "them and a date and me too.  I had dropped out of the dining hall expense and bought a mini-fridge (good for beer and cheap steaks).  Fed myself better than the dining hall did, and cheaper too.

A business major on my floor of the dorm arranged to sell cheesesteak subs for 2 hours each night for his major.  I cooked a LOT of those.  He offerred better than minimum wage and 1 free sub each night.  So, I love to cook.

Anyway, here was dinner last night.  Cubed smoked pork with smothered onions, broccoli, bicolor corn-on-the-cob, and a nice tossed salad.  With zinfandel wine and leftover cocktail.  I love variety in a meal.  

A bit of pan-frying adds taste and appearance to corn...  Well, there was oil in the pan, so why not use it?

And it makes a salad better when you have variety to choose from.

Dessert was assorted cut-up fresh fruit.

Air Fryer

OK, so I read about airfryers and bought one months ago. 

I like kitchen gadgets.  And the idea of frying without oil appeals to me.  So I finally took it out of the box a couple days ago and read the manual.  Breaded chicken parts seemed a good bet.  I was surprised at the shape.  I was expecting something that looked more like a toaster oven (square box, ya know?).

I don't like chicken skin, so I pulled it off 2 drumsticks with an aluminum pliers.  Then spiced them and added Panko bread crumbs.  The istructiobns said to press crumbs onto the meat hard, so I did that.  Also said to prewarm the air fryer for 3 minutes.  And said to reduce time if not full of stuff.

So I set the temp at 390F and pout in 2 drumsticks for 20 minutes.

I don't advertise, so I'm not saying the model I bought was best or anything.  But the drumsticks turned out GREAT!  The concept works!

The drumsticks were cooked perfectly and the breading was crisp.

I'm going to try egg rolls, breaded shrimp, and french fries next.  

The buttons are simple.  Default temp is 390F and the timer is easy enough.  The food container is easy to pull out and shake the food around for even cooking.  The food drawer is dishwasher safe but I will probably to it by hand.  There is a warning about metal scouring pads.  

I did notice one thing though.  The vent out the back pushes out some heat.  So don't leave your box of Junior Mints right behind it, LOL!  It's fine on a regular kitchen counter but I think I will store my pizza stone behind it.

And here I thought my Fry Baby was the coolest way to cook breaded stuff.  This WAY better.

Cooking Time, Part 2

I posted a recipe yesterday, but there is some background to my enjoyment of cooking...  In fact the previous post was mostly this one, so I decided to divide it.

I actually enjoy cooking.  Even as a child and teen, I was often around the kitchen, doing small chores like peeling potatoes, mashing cooked potatoes, cutting the ends off green beans, husking and desilking corn, etc. 

In college, I was in the first coed dorm at Univ Of MD my sophomore to senior years.  It was previously a women's dorm, and was THAT a surprise!  And not what you may think.  THEY had an oven and stovetop in THEIR rec room.  And just that same year, the Univ allowed dorm residents to go to a partial dining hall plan.  So I bought a mini fridge and kept basic food there.  I also worked 1 week for a cookware company who gave you your sample kit after your first sale.  I had to spend a day in instruction, 3 days before my first sale, and then I quit.  It was seriously high quality cookware. 

Ever heard of Wonderware?  The stuff was amazing!  Stainless steel outside, full copper to the top in the middle, and stainless steel inside.  It was so sturdy, you could jump on it.  The heat conduction was so even, you could simmer at the lowest temperature.  The tops were flat.  In the training session, the Instructor cooked a full meal and dessert by stacking 3 pots on top of 1 burner!  As I recall, it was beef stew in the large bottom pot, corn on the cob in the pot above, and pineapple upside down cake in the top one.

The pieces I still have will be 50 years old in 2 years and still look nearly new.  I had one piece stolen in the dorm (a strange but useless item like a half-height saucepan, and an egg poacher piece disappeared (I assume some apartment-mate stole it years later).

Funny story:  The one sale I made was to a former high school co-student.  I was showing how strong the stuff was when the drunken Dad (6' tall and 250 pounds) came home, glared at me, and said "I bet I can bend it".  So he jumped on the saucepan (on its side), skidded off, and pretty much knocked himself out when he fell (it might have just been the alcohol, too, LOL).  The saucepan was undamaged.

The daughter immediately bought a full set.  I bet she made sure Dad saw her using that set for a long time!  That was my only sale.  I'm not a good salesman, even with a good product.  I can't ask for the money...

But also, I was bothered by the sales pitch.  The company had a great product, but the stuff was expensive.  A few years ago, I considered replacing some of the lost pieces, and as far as I could tell, the price for the basic set was about $1500-2,000 in today's dollars. 

The companies sales technique was to hire college guys to go home for the Summer and sell it to former female co-students as "dowry items".  Sounds sick now.  But it gets worse.  It was sold as monthly payments for a year.  I learned their practce was to resell the contract to a 3rd party who repossessed the set after a single missed payment (which often happened to the young women who were the sales targets). 

How do you think that made the young women think about the guy they knew from high school?

It only occurred to me later that the sample kit I earned was probably a repossession.  And they were depending on using us college guys to sell to our female high school friends (well, what OTHER young women did we know back home?) 

Some of the guys I started with were real successes from Day 1.  One guy sold 10 sets his first week.  Sold a full set each to a former co-student, her  Mother, and an Aunt.  He spent some money to replicate the Instructor demonstration, and they all fell in love with him...  He is probably retired to a private Caribbean Island now.

I bet the company's sales technique didn't bother him in the least bit.