A large part of my life consists of trying to be domestic and failing. Due to said failure I have done deep seeded and irreparable damage to my self-confidence related to wife-ing. This is why it took me five years to start cooking.
I once made Chili for a party we were hosting and charred the bottom of it. In a salvaging effort I thought it would be helpful to scrape the char from the bottom of the pan, not sure why that made sense at the time, but as you can assume the burn taste then permeated the whole pot of soup which we all ate anyways and called it, smokey. I also cooked in the oven smoked salmon, like it was fresh salmon, which is sort of like baking turkey sandwich meat and serving it for thanksgiving. I somehow missed the al dente lesson concerning pasta and boiled some spaghetti noodles until they were so overdone that they died and returned to their original state of wet formless flour. I cooked them into oblivion, as my mother would say. Because of these failures I quit, and for five years our fridge usually had an egg in it that was wildly passed its expiration date and probably some jar items that never really expire, like Dijon mustard.
Then one day I roasted some potatoes and they turned out good. Trever gained a baby bit of confidence in me and thus, so did I. Slowly I started buying food and making salads, lots and lots of salads because they are very hard to mess up. I made Vietnamese salad with napa cabbage, and Greek salad with feta cheese and crumbled pita chips, and a mixed grain salad with tomatoes and cucumbers. The first step into the wonderland of salads is making homemade dressing, which I did. Dressing by the way is much easier than one might think and far superior to the bottled super market version, which is just a cover for putting preserved sugar on salads. Blerg. Now at the ripe age of 29 I cook at home several nights a week and only fail miserably a couple of times a year.
I do my best to cook healthy, which essentially means we eat a lot of vegetables. This works out well for me as I don’t eat meat and fortunately my skinny husband obliges my first-world eating preferences. I have however, inadvertently developed a reputation for myself that I am some sort of health nut. I know this because my friends moms always like to come up to me and tell me they were health nuts before it was cool and proceed to recite their health related fanaticism. I'm really not that extreme, I like to watch everyone get on and off bandwagons for what is and isn’t killing us all. Starting with fat, then all carbohydrates, then sugar, now gluten, and on it goes. I just think we generally would do good to stop cutting out entire food groups and just eat fresh food (except vegetarians because we’re different, we cut out a food group in a stance against animal murder – virtual eye roll).
Also I think we should balance quality of life with our eating habits. Friends of mine have become such health enthusiasts that they complain constantly about their weak stomach's inability to process pizza anymore and they wear it like a badge of honor. Happiness is also very good for your body, pizza makes the world happy, in conclusion we should never stop eating pizza. On that note, if our bodies can no longer process pizza we have done something terribly wrong and must retrace our steps to return ourselves to pizza, even if that means we eat it until it stops hurting. Plus, if we just ate pizza with natural ingredients and cut out the chemicals and preservatives all the way from the farming of grain, to the raising of cows for milk, to the fermenting of bread, we would all be just fine!
Ok so we got to my point -fermenting bread. You’ve seen cooked on Netflix right? Did you see the one about air? If you didn’t you should, but for now *spoiler alert* I will tell you that they interview a baker who goes through the history of bread and emphasizes the need for whole flour and natural yeast. He convinced me of the need for fermenting our bread with natural yeast via our own starters. BTW, my friend and farmer Bill Spencer at Windrose Farm makes his own starter and bread and it is the best bread, it is heaven in a crunchy little loaf. Because I will NEVER give up gluten, I am trying this whole homemade bread domestic wife thing. This whole ramble was to convince you and me, that I can do it! I have begun my starter and it is sitting on top of my fridge stinking up my kitchen. I have to feed it every day which essentially means throwing out half of what looks like pancake batter and adding more flour and water to allow it to keep growing. Grow baby yeast grow! I might fail but I won’t tell you until I succeed because I prefer to parade my excellence to the world wide web as often as I can. If I find the perfect recipe I might share, we’ll see.