Now I’m Cooking

Recently my doctor had me give up about 8 quarts of blood for a comprehensive food-allergy analysis. Not only did the test indicate that I was severely anemic – go figure – but it turns out I am allergic to nearly every substance known to man. In fact, it’s easier to list the things I can eat than the things I cannot; what follows is a complete list of approved foodstuffs:

• Air
• Ferns

I’m not exaggerating by all that much, actually. It’s virtually impossible to eat out – although I do cheat a little – so mostly I am enjoying home-cooked meals that range in quality from dreadful to awful.

Since my mostly-vegetarian diet has gone by the wayside, and since my wife continues to be a strict vegetarian, I find myself in the kitchen several times a day, bumbling through whatever recipes I can find for the ingredients that are on the approved list.

And against all odds, I’m really enjoying the process of meal preparation. (It’s actually a lot easier to prepare meals that involve fish or chicken – I refuse to wander into beef territory – than worrying about the protein-complementarity of legumes, whatever they are.)

Of course, being a tech junkie and a toy freak, it’s not enough to haul out whatever pots and pans we have at hand – I am shopping for a high-end set of cookware, on the theory that the better the cookware, the more things will cook themselves. (So far my research has resulted in nothing more than my being able to spell and pronounce “Calphalon” correctly.)

And since I’m in the kitchen a lot more – heretofore I needed a map to find it – I’m realizing that our stove really sucks. Sure, it’s great as a place to store things – neither Sharon nor I have ever used it for its intended purpose – but as a stove, it makes a great breadbox. So now I have my eyes on a really good stove, which, given what we have now, can be defined as one with four working burners and an oven that comes within 50° of the temperature you set.

While I am pipe-dreaming about that $2000 stove and cookware that costs nearly as much, I managed to find something really cool that cost me all of $0 at the App Store: something called “Copy Me That,” a recipe program that not only lets you store your own recipes – my great-great-grandmother’s haggis, for example, a cherished family recipe that is totally inedible and always has been – but also makes it one-click easy to grab recipes from online repositories like the Food Network and All Recipes.com.

So for now I am busily downloading the recipes for the meals that I will prepare on my Doyon Artisan stove in my All-Clad cookware. but until I’m ready to spend what a small house would cost, I don’t want to ruin the cooking experience. So until then, I’m sticking to hard-boiled eggs and kale salad.

Actually, that haggis is beginning to sound pretty good.

Now I’m Cooking by Jay Mitchell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.