“But Glenna wants to be the judge of his success.“
My wife Glenna and I married in the middle of our freshman year of college. Between the two of us, we had a fairly complete culinary repertoire: she made an excellent grilled cheese sandwich, and I could fry an egg, but not really to her liking. Bacon was hit or miss depending on the day. Toast I had covered, assuming nothing went wrong between the bread and the toaster.
Fortunately there was a donut shop within walking distance that sold day-old bags for a dollar. We were not going to starve.
Over the years Glenna became an excellent cook. I became pretty good at loading the dishwasher. When I empty it, I’m still not entirely sure where everything goes — but I can get it clean. That has been our arrangement for most of fifty-plus years, and it has worked fine.
But not being able to cook and not wanting to learn are two different things. I have always wanted to learn. I just never quite got around to it — until now.
The First Attempt (Such As It Was)
Years ago, Glenna took a part-time job at a local grocery store in their flower department. She loves flowers and flower arranging and thought it might give her some experience. It mostly just cut into her free time. But one night she had the late shift and wasn’t getting home until around 9:00 pm.
When she walked in the door she found a table set with candles, an Italian salad, a basket of bread, and a plate of spaghetti with marinara sauce. Excellent spaghetti, I might add — from one of the most popular Italian restaurants in our city, which Glenna and I both loved. I had personally spooned every bit of it from the to-go containers onto the plates all by myself.
I did not attempt to cook another meal for her for the next sixteen or seventeen years.
The Ohio Practice Run
About five years ago Glenna and I downsized into two smaller condos — one in Tennessee, one in Ohio — to be closer to our two daughters’ families and the six grandchildren that came with them. (Hence the title of this blog.) We are rarely in either place by ourselves, usually traveling between them together.
But this past spring I had gone up to Ohio alone to watch the full solar eclipse — more on that in the Granddaddy Can’t Find Saturn section — and Glenna had stayed in Tennessee. I had been thinking for a while about cooking her a real meal. Not spooning something out of a to-go container. An actual meal, from scratch, that I had made myself.
The menu I had selected sounded straightforward enough: double-cut pork chops, skillet-browned and oven-baked; Brussels sprouts cooked in bacon, honey, and maple syrup; a matchstick carrot and apple salad; a twice-baked potato; and an old-fashioned apple dumpling for dessert.
Then the fun began.
I went to the grocery store at least twice — an hour each time — trying to locate all the ingredients. The apple dumpling recipe called for “pie dough for a 9-inch double-crust pie, homemade or store-bought.” I figured store-bought was the safer bet. I did not know where they kept it. I also did not know that later in the same recipe it would instruct me to “peel and core each apple.” I did not own an apple corer. I did not know apple corers existed. My personal favorite instruction: cut the pie crust into 7-inch squares. Pie crust is round. All tremendous learning opportunities for the novice cook.
The pork chops required a large oven-safe skillet. Do you know how expensive those are at kitchen stores? I made several stops at discount stores before I found one I could live with. I also had to introduce myself to the grocery store butcher — we are now friends — and acquire a small supporting cast of spices, carrots, apples, and other ingredients I had never purchased in my life.
I started cooking at 3:00 pm. At 8:00 pm I called my daughter and begged her to come over and taste-test everything before I committed to serving it to her mother. She came. She gave me a thumbs up. The photo below was taken at 8:40 pm.
I had been cooking for five hours and twenty minutes. The first thing I learned was that there will not be a section on this website called “Granddaddy Can’t Open a Restaurant.”
But my daughter said it was good. So about a month later I asked Glenna to go shopping one Saturday afternoon and give me the kitchen. She obliged. I had a schedule this time, dropped the twice-baked potatoes from the menu since they had not gone well in practice, and had everything on the table in about four hours. It all worked out.
I am not ready to buy myself a chef’s hat. But I am ready to keep going.
So What Is This Section?
This is not a cooking site. I want to be clear about that upfront. If you can already dice an onion the way they do on television, this section is probably not for you. If you tried that, you would leave parts of your fingers in the bowl. I know because I thought about it.
One side lesson I learned preparing the meal for Glenna, is that I don’t have hours each day to prepare food. Occasionally, yes, that is fun and rewarding, particularly if it all works. But on a day in and day out basis, I wanted to learn how to cook, regular stuff, with a lot of prepared food and add a Lagniappe (a little something extra) to it, to make it special without spending 4 hours in preparation. That is what we are going to learn together.
What this section is about is learning to cook by actually cooking — making mistakes, figuring out what went wrong, and doing it again. The meals will come from real occasions: breakfast, lunch, dinner, Sunday lunch for the family, football game with the guys, and even occasionally a much nicer dinner for Glenna. Real food for real people, prepared by someone who is still not entirely sure where the oven-safe skillet lives when it’s not in use.
If that is where you are in your cooking journey, pull up a stool. You are in exactly the right place.
What’s Coming
Here is a taste of what is ahead — and yes, I am aware that is a cooking pun:
• Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup — making the easiest meal in the cookbook, a little special.
• Granddaddy Can’t Boil Water in Under Five Hours — kitchen timing is apparently a skill. I am acquiring it slowly.
• Everything in My Wife’s Kitchen Has a Name. I Knew None of Them. — a tour of the tools, where they hide, and what they actually do.
• Grocery Shopping Mistakes — the difference between homemade and store-bought, and why it matters more than I thought.
• Cooking for Others — when exactly is it appropriate to inflict your cooking experiments on people outside your immediate family?
Some of these topics will take more than one post to cover properly. That’s fine. We are not in a hurry, and there are no grades.
One last thing worth saying: this whole website — the telescope, the Bible, the golf, all of it — started here. With a retired man who wanted to cook a real meal for his wife and had absolutely no idea how. Everything else grew out of that. I thought you should know.
Grace and Peace —
Scott Walker