Confessions of an Amateur Home Chef

Things I've learned (and haven't learned) while discovering a love of cooking.

I know that Everything is Bad right now, the man who somehow stumbled into being in charge (again) is ruining more people's lives every day, and every time you open your phone there's more bad news, but in order to resist we have to persist, so please take this post about absolutely nothing that matters as a form of resistance. I'm not going to lie down and give up. I'm not going to pretend nothing is happening, but there are far more qualified people than me breaking down what's going on out thereon pretty much every platform you can imagine, and that's not what this space is for. This space is to prove they can't steal our joy (or, as someone on Tiktok said, un-they our thems.)

So, let's talk about something that doesn't matter at all: my cooking skills (or lack thereof.) As some of you know, I've been using mealkits like Hello Fresh (and most often literally Hello Fresh) for about ten years now, and documenting my journey on Instagram. This is not sponsored by Hello Fresh, but if they wanted to sponsor me, or hire me to make their recipes more idiot-proof, I'm available.

I didn't really learn how to cook growing up, because my mother doesn't love cooking. My cousins and I joke that she and her sister are the only Italians we've ever met who don't like to cook (though then again, my Nana didn’t cook that much growing up either; it was mostly Papa Gino.) I only remember my dad cooking once when I was about eight and he somehow overcooked the steak and undercooked the french fries. (He has since mastered the toaster oven, and makes a mean breakfast sandwich.) My mother had her go-to recipes (including some real bangers - I was a fan of her mac and cheese, and her chicken wings are still a hit at any family gathering.), but she and my brother were also picky eaters, so there wasn't a lot of experimentation or newness. Which is totally fair - cooking sometimes feels like a chore to me and I don't have two children on top of anywhere from 1-3 jobs at any given moment, so I don’t blame her for sticking with what works! But as I branched out on my own, I started experimenting and realized I actually do enjoy cooking from a recipe. It's like doing a bunch of little tasks and at the end you get a meal! And I love an achievable task. Plus, I have a lot more freedom to experiment since, if I mess something up, I'm the only one who has to deal with the consequences. (And by that I mean, force myself to eat it anyway and just never make that recipe again.)

At the beginning of my journey, I was working at a company that made kitchen products, so I also considered this endeavor a bit of research; I was really good at writing copy for products I'd never even heard of before my first meeting with the product manager, but it's always easier when I have first-hand experience with something. I learned a lot in those early years, like that you should read the recipe all the way through before starting (a practice I know in theory but hardly ever successfully execute), and that there are SO MANY vegetables that are actually just secretly onions. I cooked with vegetables I'd never even heard of, made use of so many kitchen gadgets I had only known to how to use in theory, and learned skills that I would eventually be able to apply to recipe-free cooking. I now consider myself a decent amateur home chef, even though I still have my Hello Fresh training wheels on, and also no one else has ever eaten what I've made before. But *I* like it, and I'm the only one who lives here, so I'm the only one who matters, in this one instance.

That said, despite all the learning and growing I've done as a home chef in the last decade, I'm still me, someone who was labelled as "chaotic good" by a friend long before I had ever even seen a D&D alignment chart. This means, while I love to be a rule-follower in a lot of scenarios, if I don't understand or like a rule, I simply *will not* follow it. Your rules have to make sense to me to activate my teacher's pet personality. (I would have quit within one hour of my first shift at the restaurant in The Bear.) So, more often than not, in the kitchen, I'm going rogue.

And since I love a list, that's what we're going to make. Specifically, a list of confessions I have about rules I break, things I still haven't learned, and reasons any reputable culinary school would hate to see me coming.

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I never use the scallion greens. After I cut up the scallion whites (probably much higher than most people would), I toss the rest. I hate being wasteful but I've tried adding them and it tastes like I ruined a perfectly good dish by sprinkling grass on top of it. For this reason, if I'm replicating a Hello Fresh recipe on my own, I skip the scallions altogether and add onion powder in its place.

I can never, ever, ever remember how many teaspoons in a tablespoon, tablespoons in a cup, etc. I still know the the Greek alphabet and the entire Catholic Mass (pre-2010) from having to memorize it once upon a time, but for some reason I cannot lock these numbers in. Which means I am constantly asking my virtual assistant Gideon for help when I'm trying to halve a recipe. I am pretty smart and decently good at math, but very bad at this, for some reason.

No matter what a recipe tells me to do with my garlic, I put it in my garlic press. Chop, mince, dice? Nope. All pressed, all the time. The ONLY exception is the rare occasion I have to mince garlic and ginger and maybe a shallot all at once and I can throw them into my mini whopper chopper. (I just realized that is just a household name for it and it's actually called the Tupperware Chop 'N Prep. I have an OXO One Chop Shop for bigger things, but the same concept.)

Speaking of ginger, I hate peeling it. I wish Hello Fresh sent me pre-minced ginger, even though I know it wouldn't last as long. I feel like I waste so much because I just end up cutting a bunch off. I know, conceptually, that there's a "spoon trick" but I have yet to successfully execute it.

I have no idea what exactly a recipe means when it says to put something on "medium-high heat." My stovetop is so old it's practically wood-burning and the knobs have ten increments. If you gave me a piece of paper with 1-10 numbered on it and told me to place a dot at "medium-high" I'd probably put it at like 7 or 8. But, in my experience, that's way too hot! I don’t know if it’s my stove or or my cookware but 7 or 8 would burn anything I left sitting for more than the five seconds it takes to read the next step in the recipe. The only time I go above 6 is to boil water! So when it comes to choosing my stovetop setting, I just go on vibes.

At least 75% of the time, if the only reason a recipe wants me to turn on my oven is to bake vegetables that can be sautéed, I sauté them instead. I know this changes the *integrity* of the dish, but I cannot express to you how little I care. Especially in the summer, the last thing I want to do is turn on my stone age oven that takes 84 years to get hot and then, once it finally does, it also makes my entire apartment hot and has a 25% chance of setting off the smoke alarm for no reason. There are some things I'll do it for (like a sweet potato) but peppers and onions are almost definitely just going into a pan.

Alternatively, sometimes Hello Fresh wants me to mix hot and cold in one meal, and unless that mixture is sour cream in my chili, no thank you. I refuse to eat raw onions (or anything that touched their death-juice thank you), and if you give me tomatoes, I am going to cook them, and I'm not even a little bit sorry about it.

As much as doing dishes can be a pain in the ass, I have no knife skills, so I WILL use kitchen gadgets to dice and slice for me. This is a matter of time-saving (seriously it saves so much time), ADHD-saving (aka it helps prevent me from getting bored of the task partway through because it's too repetitive), AND life-saving (I am a klutz and have and will injure myself; the less time a knife is in my hand, the better.)

I have never once experienced the phenomenon I've heard of called "too much garlic."

Plucking the leaves off herbs like parsley is so tedious to me. I even have tools to help it along but it’s still often my least favorite part of any prep process. Don't even get me started on thyme. (I have dried versions of many herbs in shakers for when I go rogue. Probably sacrilegious to my Italian ancestors, but less wasteful!)

I have no idea if I have the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap. I eat cilantro, but I can't be sure I am not tasting the same thing as people who taste soap, it's just that I don't mind it. There's no way to know!

I'm not sure who Hello Fresh is kidding when it tells you to "serve with lime/lemon wedges." For why? In my own home?? I’m not plating these dishes. I barely get them looking good enough for Instagram. It’s going in my belly soon enough, why waste time with making it pretty? However many wedges it tells me to serve with it is what I squeeze on top at the end, if I didn’t just use the whole citrus earlier in the recipe when it called for half.

I wish more recipes had instructions for how to store leftovers. I've learned through trial and error that some dishes are fine if you fully assemble them, then split them into servings to eat one and store the rest. But some are better if you keep the ingredients separate until it's time to eat them. And there's really no way to know for sure. I use my best judgement on this from past experiences and, I dunno, logic, but sometimes it’s hit or miss. Same with whether certain parts of the recipe can even be cooked ahead of time. For example, there's a Hello Fresh ramen recipe I make that I learned the hard way needs to be stored in the fridge with the noodles separate from the broth. It makes sense now that I know it, but I wasn't thinking! I just mixed everything together then split it. Then I had, like, fat ramen worms instead of skinny noodles. So now I store the noodles separately. I probably should cook them separately, but I've found that reheating the broth then adding the cooked noodles does work fine. But for the buffalo cauliflower tacos, I've found that reheating the pre-fried cauliflower makes them a bit soggy and sad. So now I add the batter to the cauliflower, split it in half, and only cook one serving. (It should also be noted that I don't have a microwave, which is a factor in deciding how to reheat my leftovers.)

And last but not least, one thing I've learned over the past decade or so of learning to cook is that one of the things that makes me feel the most like a real adult is when I have an idea for something I want to make - often based on having one specific ingredient - and I have all the ingredients to make it happen. My kitchen staples stay stocked, I've slowly built up my spice cabinet, and I've learned to always have things like soy sauce and vegetable stock on hand. I've also gotten pretty good at improvising! (And also googling "[ingredient] replacement ideas.") It brings me joy.

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Now, listen, don't get me wrong, I'm not over here making gourmet meals. In fact, some days the most "cooking" or "improvising" I do involves throwing some plant-based meatballs into some Kraft mac and cheese or making frozen fake-chicken nuggets and rice-a-roni. I have had many a canned soup lunch. In this house, fed is best! But when I have the time and the energy to cook, I do find it to be a fun experience. Sometimes relaxing, sometimes chaotic, always an event. I pop on a podcast or an audiobook, or sometimes even music if I'm in the mood or a kitchen dance party, and enjoy some me-time where I'm not doomscrolling or being in front of 2-4 screens at once. And then at the end, I get to enjoy a meal and be proud that I made it myself.

At least, until it's time to do the dishes.