Cook Like You’ll Eat It
Eating and cooking these days
have added to our waistlines. Duh…
Here is my excuse.
My first recollection of
cooking was making toast with my Mom, which at the time was a pretty important
job for one so young. From toast I progressed to biscuits out of a tube and
then on to bacon. Biscuits were easy, all you do is turn on the stove. Mom
would let me cook the bacon standing on a stool in front of the stove when I
was probably 9 or 10 years old. She would turn on the stove, let the pan warm
up and then let me layer the bacon strips one by one. From bacon I graduated to
fried eggs. Although I like my eggs over medium now, back then I felt the same
way most kids did about runny eggs; yuck. To achieve the hockey puck texture of
a hard fried egg, I had to learn to break the yolks and then use the spatula to
gently toss the hot grease over the eggs until they were done.
Over the years I dabbled when
& where I could, but never had to cook a full out meal. Oh sure, I became
proficient in Hamburger Helper. I could warm up a mean Swanson Chicken Pot Pie
and cook a pretty good hamburger in the iron skillet, but real food evaded me.
Reality hit me when I moved out of my parent’s house for the first time. I was
17 years old that September in 1980, with 18 arriving a few weeks later. Before
I left home, Mom let me make copies of recipes of my favorite meals to help me
out. Spaghetti sauce, Cuban Chicken, Chili and others were the main ones. Mom
even gave me an old tattered Betty Croker cookbook to take with me. Susie still
uses it to this day for a few recipes.
Robert Skelton and I became
roommates in the fall of 1980.
I don’t think Robert had ever
boiled water before. I did most of the “cooking” which consisted mainly of yes,
you guessed correctly, Hamburger Helper. Finally tiring of that, plus hamburgers
and pizza, I decided to change the menu. I decided Spaghetti was to be my first
creation. The recipe called for 3-4 cloves of garlic. Me being the classically
trained chef from the Jane Guest (Mom) school of cooking, I theorized that a clove
was actually a bulb of garlic. There
was no way I could get the right hint of garlic from 3 little pieces, right? I
think it took an hour to peel all three bulbs and then chop them up for the
sauce. How in the world was Mom able to make spaghetti sauce so quickly? She
must have mad knife skills.
The finished spaghetti sauce
definitely had that hint of garlic. Robert gave it a taste and the look on his
face was priceless. He managed to eat some of it and then told me he had a late
lunch that day and wasn’t hungry. I forced my plate down and burped a lot the
next day or so. I was soon set straight on the difference between a clove and a
bulb. My Mom coached me through it but I know she was stifling a gut laugh.
Over time I read more cook
books and tried to cook for myself, but cooking for one person can be difficult.
For instance, Jim Young Oysters was a recipe my Dad would cook from time to
time. The Young’s were friends of my parents and had eclectic food preferences.
They fixed us Cherries Jubilee once and I solemnly believe that anything that
you set on fire at the table is cool. Jim Young Oysters are an oyster dish
sautéed in garlic, green onion, butter and white wine and served over toasted
French Bread. Oysters could be purchased in pint jars, but wine, as you know is
bottled in larger vessels. I only needed about a half cup of wine, and I didn’t
want the rest to go to waste, so you can guess what I did with the remaining 28
ounces. I think the first time I cooked this oyster dish it was pretty good. I
just don’t seem to remember much about that night.
While in college I was amazed
that so many my friends either couldn’t or wouldn’t cook. They generally lived
in the dorms the first several years and didn’t have to cook. When they left
the dorms, they were hit with a task most had never done before. When I
registered at Tarleton State University in Jan 1986, I was a 23 year old
freshman and thankfully had been on my own for awhile. I could wash clothes,
cook and take care of myself for the most. I went to Brian Mannen’s apartment
once to study and he asked me if I wanted to eat dinner. He was making chili and
I said I would be honored to eat dinner with him. Then he told me how he cooked
it. Browned ground beef with a bottle of ketchup. I don’t know how I managed to
get out of there before dinner, but I did. I’m not saying I was a better
individual than Brian, but I just didn’t think I could force that epicurean
delight down.
By the time Susie and I
married, we both had come up with a pretty decent arsenal of recipes. On one of
our first dates, she cooked a pot roast that was out of this world. I then cooked
her my go-to meal of Cuban Chicken. Those two remain in the rotation to this
day. Joining a cooking book club really put us over the top. Pretty soon we
must have had 15 cookbooks. Celebrity chefs were beginning to be all the rage
and the Food Network and Cooking Channel were going strong. In college I
watched Justin Wilson’s cooking show on PBS. Cajun cooking at its finest. This
eventually morphed into Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay. Julia Child would be
amazed at what she started all those years ago.
I became interested in
smoking food about 25 years ago. I paid $150.00 for a New Braunfels offset fire
smoker at Academy, bought the cookbook “Smoke and Spice” and was on my way. It
turned out this was like starting all over again and I was lost for about a
year. My food would be cooked, but could never pass for barbeque. Thank
goodness for the web, because I would spend hours pouring over cooking websites
and chat rooms. I finally figured it out that barbeque/smoking is similar to
braising in a few ways. Although you don’t use liquid like you would when you
braise meats, the low temperatures over an extended period of time is similar.
The greatest explanation of barbeque and smoking meats that I ever read, is
that the meat is cooked beyond the point of done, but at a low temperature. The
long cooking times had me thinking I had overdone it, when that was exactly
what you do when smoking meats.
One of my greatest pleasures
is cooking for others. I began this journey a few years back with Harry
Caldwell. Harry was an Ivesco swine rep and he asked me to help him cook
Christmas dinner for one of his customers, Texas Farms. We cooked app 60 whole
pork loins and fed about 200 people. The next day we cooked for another hog
farm in Kansas, but “only for 100 people”.
We cooked all the sides in Harry’s motel room (note it to be a motel, not a hotel) and kept tripping the electrical breakers in his room. When
you have 4 or 5 electric steamers plugged into the walls, this happens. When we
were finished with the parties, we washed the dishes and utensils in Harry’s bathtub.
You work with what you got.
I helped Harry and other
co-workers cook for customers over the next several years. Ken Callahan and I
cooked app 120 chicken leg quarters for Sanderson Farms employees.
We bought the sides at a local BBQ restaurant,
but did everything else ourselves. Brandon Nicholson, Sonny Nolan and I have
cooked for our customers in California over the last several years. The first
time Brandon and I cooked together we cooked rib eye roasts for 100 people on a
borrowed grill. We had a few mishaps, (flare ups from the fat dripping in the
fire or the occasional fly landing on the food) but no one died. I think…
Amazingly enough, we were
invited back. That has to be the biggest and best compliment we have ever
received.
Hopefully next year I will
take the plung and purchase a mobile cooker/smoker that I can haul around with
me. I have been pining to do this for years and I think I might be able to
swing it. Cooking competitions are next and I hope we can try our hand at them
in 2017.
I don’t think I have the
patience and drive to cook for a living. My energy level doing that every day
would run low I’m sure. I also have a very discerning palate; I cook what I
like. I don’t know if I could cook Hollandaise sauce, because frankly, it looks
awful. Unfortunately, menudo falls in that category also. Sorry Susie. Friends
of mine like Dario Borelli are more daring than me. Dario will jump into
anything and either cook it or eat it.
He once texted me a picture
of a duck head at a market in Sacramento.
God bless him.
Sonny and Brandon's arm...
