Food is Life

[jducoeur]

It had to happen sooner or later -- after being snowed in for two days, I finally cooked dinner for myself.

Yes, I could have taken something out of the freezer. There's lots, thank you -- at this point, I'm not fishing for more contributions. The chicken soup brought over by goldsquare was just the thing last night. But the simple fact is, I'm a cook. Cooking is self-expression for me, and one of the more fun activities I know. So I decided to just deal.

Of course, my approach to cooking tends to be a bit intuitive, and somewhat random. Tonight's dinner went kind of like this:

"What am I going to make? I'm stuck at home, and kind of ingredient-shy. No milk, which does let out some options. Oh, look: the second half of yesterday's bread dough is trying to eat the fridge. Okay, pizza it is.

All right, I need a Protein Unit. I don't think I have any shrimp, though, and I *always* use shrimp. Ah -- here's a hamburger, frozen sometime in the dark ages. Boring, but it's a start. And hiding behind it is a hot sausage! Now we're getting somewhere.

What's in the pantry? Here's a can of diced tomato -- that goes with sausage. A can of black olives, a can of button mushrooms, sure. And a tin of anchovies! (When did I buy a tin of anchovies?) I seem to have an Italian thing going on here.

Fry up the sausage nice and crisp. Now I've got sausage grease, so I may as well fry the hamburger up in it. Just keep frying that, and frying some more, and a little more yet, until I have almost as much fond as meat. Toss it together with the tomatoes and the olives -- that's looking nice. Add some oregano, and basil, and some garlic powder: now I'm getting my Italian on. Let's mince a few anchovies into it... no, those anchovies stopped being food sometime before we moved into this house. I didn't *really* want anchovies anyway. Let's add a little pesto concentrate instead, and focus on basilizing the flavor. Do I actually want these mushrooms? These bland, boring, canned mushrooms? Nah, they're an insult to the other ingredients, and I have enough volume -- put them back.

Roll out the dough. Wait -- there's always a sauce. What am I going to do for a sauce? Pesto will overwhelm it, and these spaghetti sauces are all boring. Screw it: I'll just brush the dough with a little basil and garlic oil, and spread everything on. Annnnd -- I don't have any mozzarella. I'm congenitally incapable of making pizza without cheese! Hmm. Well, I've got some of this Rondele cracker spread -- that's kind of like goat cheese in texture, and I know that works on pizza, and the flavor profile is right, so let's just dollop a little on top here and there.

Wait for the oven to reheat. (Foot tapping.) Oh, look: I've got the dregs of a jar of sun-dried tomatoes! I *have* to toss those bits on top. Might as well drizzle a little of the oil they were packed in, to spread the flavor around. Into the oven we go!"

And bake, and eat, and the results officially Don't Suck. A little odd, but my pizzas are always a little odd, and the flavors blended nicely and the crust came out just right.

Cooking for myself is -- well, kind of alien, and certainly a little hard on my psyche. And I ate far too much: it was a smallish pizza, but I still ate the whole damned thing. But cooking for myself is better than not cooking at all. Eventually I'll figure out how to scale it down, and to invite people over. That's kind of scary: Jane's always been a forgiving audience for my crazy experiments, willing to put up with the 25% that come out kind of mediocre, and the 10% that are critical failures. But I need to cook, so I'll learn to do so in this environment...