Introducing the Elephant

While my kids have often told me I walk like an elephant (I like to say I walk "purposefully," but they probably have a point), the real "elephant in the kitchen" is the simple fact that I can cook. Now, this may not seem like a terribly mind-blowing revelation to anyone who doesn't know me, but to my family and friends it's HUGE (elephant-sized, even) news. It's also very new news. Aside from perfecting my all-time favorite food (fiery hot green chili of the sort you'll find in any self-respecting Mexican restaurant in Colorado ) years ago, I've been mostly a fast-food-and-fish-sticks kind of "cook." I actually considered naming this blog just that, but a year spent on a recipe and cooking-related website brought out my inner gastronome and creative (if chaotic) cook so the title no longer fits.

Partly, I blame my sister for my very tardy, second-century foray into the kitchen. Growing up in a single-parent household with a mother who worked as many as three jobs at a time, my sister and I divvied up the household chores: My sister cooked, I cleaned. Toilets terrified her. Raw meat was simply a mystery that I felt much too young to confront. When I got married the first time (at the ridiculously young age of 17), I completely depended on Hamburger Helper and a very thin volume of Betty Crocker recipes based around hamburger. Being not-very adventurous culinarily, I settled on two recipes from my beloved hamburger cookbook to make on a weekly basis: Porcupine Balls and... Okay, I lied. I settled on one recipe and I made it at least weekly, probably more often. My then-husband lost twenty pounds in three months. It's worse than it sounds - this was after being laid off and spending all day, every day, smoking pot and watching TV. That's usually a surefire recipe for weight gain, but my cooking was a mighty adversary. (On the other hand, another thin volume of recipes afforded me a really kick-ass fish stick sauce that I've since lost and mourn piteously.)

I spent my very early twenties divorced and eating lots of fish sticks and Taco Bell. Um - not together! Sheesh. I saved my absolute worst pairing for a meal when I was several months pregnant with my first child: fish sticks (don't worry: the fish sticks really won't be a continuing feature here), applesauce and canned pork 'n beans. Oh, yum! (Please, don't ever try that at home.) But I jumped ahead there. Before I was pregnant, I fell in love with the man who would eventually knock me up and started on a new culinary adventure as a sort of love note to him: Thai food. Being Thai himself, he could only eat so much bland, American fare before he started jonesing for something inyerface! So I picked up a thin book of Thai recipes and proceeded to master several of them. Okay... a few of them. Okay, two of them: Chicken Curry and Panang Meatballs. In my defense, I did also take to heart Maluli Pinsuvana's admonition that curry paste should always be homemade and I made sure my boyfriend/eventual-husband had a batch of three different kinds on hand at all times for three solid years. Only to find out that, no, it really wasn't as good as the store-bought stuff because I had to make too many substitutions for obscure Thai ingredients. Ha! He hadn't wanted to hurt my feelings all that time, and I had gotten sick of making the stuff after three months. I don't know if that's some sort of parallel to the Gift of the Magi or just a sad little example of how poorly Mars and Venus communicate, but it continues to amuse me to this day.

Fast forward again to post-pregnancy and feeding an eighteen-month-old nutritious meals while also saving money for our first new home. I sat down every Wednesday and planned my menus (around what was on sale) for the first time in my life. And I did "okay" for the next several years in the kitchen. I didn't mix it up a lot - I still relied on a handful of favorites with an occasional wild-card thrown in, but we weren't eating the same thing twice a week and no one was losing weight.

Then child-number-two threw a wrench into the works. Unlike any child you've probably ever known, she turned suddenly picky about what she would eat between two and three years old! Of course, her older brother had gotten picky and set in his ways long before, but until she got to the uppity two-something that was okay: we all just ate what HE liked. But now what? My own mother gave us absolutely no choice at dinnertime. We ate what was put in front of us and we would sit at that table until we did. Or at least until she and my father tired of sitting there waiting and retired to the living room, at which point my sister and I would noisily clang our forks against our plates for a minute and then toss the dreaded sauerkraut or spam or spinach into the disposal. (We were so damned clever and our folks were such dunces!) But I didn't want to take that hard line because I had evolved into such a horridly picky eater and naturally blamed my mother. (That's what they're there for. Just do it.)

So, instead, I went on strike. About the four-hundred-thirty-third time one of them turned their little nose up and said "I don't like this!" I blew up and said "Fine! That's IT! I don't like to cook and you don't like my cooking so why am I killing myself?!" I knew my husband wasn't thrilled with Thai only a couple of times a month either, so I really just did feel like it was time to step back and let them have what they want. Which meant Michaelina's Budget Gourmet and Taco Bell and... you guessed it.... fish sticks (they're so damned good with Kraft Mac & Cheese! Hold the pork 'n beans though).

Through the intervening years I've gotten a fire lit under my butt and dived into the kitchen with gusto now and again, but it never lasts long. I get bored with the diet or the new cuisine or whatever spark it was that lit the fire and go back to a combination of eating out and a handful of easy favorites while my husband cooks for himself.

Then I landed on a message board where people were discussing food and recipes all day every day and a number of them were the sort of smart-assed, fun-loving sorts that I just can't resist and I got hooked. A couple of months after I started hanging out there, someone on that site challenged another member to make a dish from ingredients chosen by whomever happened to be around and willing to play at the moment. Think "Chopped" but every ingredient she was allowed to use was pre-determined by any and every yahoo who happened to weigh in. Luckily for her, the folks who weighed in were kind and provided her with a really great list and her resulting recipe was superb. I loved the idea of that challenge so much that I hosted a several "Gang-Up" challenges on that board myself, but threw it out to anyone who wanted to take a shot rather than picking one, poor soul to have to bear the burden (have the fun!) alone. I think I hosted seven or eight challenges over the next several months, and headed to the kitchen with the list from all but two of them and absolutely astounded myself every time. I had tried to throw dishes together without recipes before, but I'd never been very successful unless I was trying to imitate something I'd had in a restaurant (and even then needed lots of google help to steer me in the right direction). But with only one exception, all of my gang-up recipes ended up being such kick-ass successes that my husband gave them all four out of five stars (he saves five stars for desserts, and I don't do desserts!). Even the exception wasn't bad: my picky-youngest (you remember her? The persnickety two-something who caused the strike) liked it a lot. And I (the fifty-something masquerading as a persnickety two-something) really liked all of them myself. Which, of course, only fed the beast and whetted its appetite.

And that brings us, f i n a l l y, to the reason for this blog: I enjoyed the hell out of those Gang-Up challenges but can no longer host them on that website. While someone else has taken up the ball, it's not happening often enough to keep my creative spark burning. I miss that spark a lot. I'm really not happy unless I have a creative outlet. I have a decorative painting and interior decor business that usually feeds that beast, but business has been verrrrrry slow for the last few years (and I'm a rotten saleswoman) so this new hobby had really been filling that need. Then another member from the board mentioned foodiefights.com on Facebook and I decided I wanted in. The site doesn't require a blog, but I really wanted to blog the Gang-Ups I had already participated in so that I could have a journal of this journey for myself.

And that is why I'm here.