Guys should know how to cook a little
Never thought I’d be doing this. Yeah, I cook. Not like Gordon Ramsey or those other psychopath chefs. I cook, or used to, in order to feed women I love. Not going to get into the nitty gritty. You just have to assume I can deliver the goods, the meals people enjoy. The proof is they ask for them again.
Scrambled eggs and omelets (the bacon part is understood)
All right. Some nitty gritty. No, you don’t just fling eggs (shells a’crackin’) into a skillet on high heat and push them around for a minute or two, with a ketchup bottle at the ready. Here’s what you do. Cook the bacon first. Medium high heat. Half a one pound package. Fork in hand, you start turning as soon as the sizzling begins. Only half needs to be overdone for your wife’s sake. This is 100 percent attention time. As soon as they’ve been turned once, you back off the heat, to medium low and you wait, wait, wait for the right strips (yours) are done, then you pick them out into a dry paper towel. And wait, wait for time to do its number on her strips. Just short of burned you pull them out onto the same paper towel. Turn off the heat and move the skillet to a cold burner.
Time for eggs. You get a juice glass from the fridge. You put the eggs you’re cooking on the counter. This is the staging process. Now you pour off the bacon fat into the peanut butter jar you use for saving bacon fat. Return the skillet to medium heat. Break the eggs one by one into the juice glass and pour them gently into the skillet. Stir them up with your fork. As they start cooking, turn the heat back to medium low and add salt and pepper. Use your slender spatula to push from the skillet edges, always allowing them to fold in lovely layers. When they begin to become one with the whole eggy mass, you can turn the whole thing. Here’s where you start to distinguish between hers and yours. Yours comes out, a skillet cut, onto a plate beside the cooktop. Then hers are turned again, browned, made perfect for her, and finally transferred to her plate with perfectly near-ruined bacon.
At this point, you’re good to go.
Omelets. Almost exactly the same. There are two differences. Add the cheese and whatever she wants, then fold the whole thing before browning occurs. As with scrambled, cut with the spatula halfway through the cooking, plate yours, and fold hers twice more. She’ll love it.
I’ve got other staples that have gotten me through the days and years of cooking for others. (Cooking for myself is a can of chili, microwaved hot dogs, and fried egg sandwiches.) I used to make a good tuna casserole, paprika-fried pork chops, garlic spaghetti, baked spaghetti (very popular at family dinners), chicken stir fry, hamburger-mushroom bake, a very decent fried chicken, tasty not leathery ham steaks, lobster and crab, roast chicken with home-made mashed potatoes, Eggs Benedict, Esquire burgers, filet mignon done to the degree you like it and London Broil the way I like it, egg salad, chicken salad, and tuna salad, correctly prepared fresh vegetables like sweet corn and asparagus, home-made submarine sandwiches, and Baked Alaska, strawberry shortcake with real whipping cream, and an excellent bacon popcorn. And I’ve done passable shish kebab, chicken breasts, and burgers on charcoal barbecues. Fancy desserty baked goods (apart from box cakes with canned icing) are beyond me, but not two kinds of cookies and passable garlic bread.
I’m no chef. I acquired (and adapted) skills and recipes from my grandmothers, my mother, some other patient women, The Joy of Cooking, and in later years the Internet (e.g., spaghetti bolognese) and a wonderful spiral bound cookbook assembled by the dowagers of Salem County, New Jersey. Lost my only copy. Wish I could find it again.
At points in the past I have toyed with the idea of doing a cookbook for bachelors, with the hidden agenda of teaching guys how to entertain women in their digs without resorting at once to the couch, delivery pizza, alcohol, and a rented movie. You know. Cultivate your domestic abilities, give them an opportunity to chat and engage without keeping constant watch on your hands, and — God forbid! — give yourself a means of learning about them even on brief acquaintance. I may have ginned up a cover for a Kindle effort, but that’s about all. I didn’t really like The Lonely Guy Cookbook and other training wheels approaches to male culinary education.
Still wish I could find that old Salem cookbook. It’s fun remembering those genteel old ladies and their thriftily written, sometimes opaque, instructions (“just before it curdles”). Days gone by. My cooking days seem to be in the past as well. But a cat can still look at a cookbook.
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