I Can't Cook: Panic in the Safeway

I was standing in the middle of an aisle in a Safeway in the West End of Glasgow when I realized I couldn't cook. The panic rose slowly and so I did what one should always do in moments like that. I fed it a baguette. Problem solved until I phoned my mom in New York later that night; then it returned with a vengeance. 

I CAN'T COOK. WHY DON'T I KNOW HOW TO COOK?

Back then talking to a loved one oversees meant you were spending precious money on minutes. Ever a New Yorker, my mother immediately and efficiently snapped me back to reality. We are a family of tough love.

"Stop freaking out. You know how to cook. You've been cooking with me since you were little. You just don't have any recipes floating around in your head. You haven't been practicing. What do you want to cook and I'll tell you what you need to do."

Problem solved. I went back to Safeway the next morning, bought all the ingredients for baked ziti and went over my boyfriend's flat that night and made it. It wasn't quite the roast and Yorkshire pudding his flatmate had made the week before, but it was competent and more than anything.....it was delicious.

I am not a fancy cook. I consistently over or under salt my meals--just ask my partner who can do a spot-on impression of my complicated relationship with salt. But I love to cook. It's a way I show love to my family. It's a way I've shown love to friends. It's the way I get through each day knowing that at the end of it I can eat something delicious that I made myself. 

I've been thinking about cooking a lot lately. Since the pandemic started way back in March, I could probably count on my fingers and toes the amount of times we've ordered takeout or actually gone out to eat (only once, we were starving, ate outside). If I had my act together, I would have started a pandemic food journal on day one, but I didn't. Life just kept getting in the way. 

Recently, however, my mom threw out the idea when my daughter and I sent her pictures of the Halloween feast we were making. A feast, I should mention, that was made in the middle of a power outage, the result of a storm two days before. 

Ever the efficient and honest New Yorker, once again, she got right to the point. "You two should have a food blog." 

I told Nuala what Grandma had said. "She's right. We should."

Nuala lives with her dad half the time and lately, since becoming vegetarian, she's been doing a lot of cooking at his house. We share a New York Times account so we can see the recipes the other wants to make. I've sent her pictures of recipes from our favorite cookbooks. Her requests for dishes I make have actually made me start to write down meals I have been making from memory since that fateful day in the Safeway 20 plus years ago. 

I grew up in tiny attached house in Queens. My memories of celebrations and holidays hosted at our house are jumbled pictures. Overflowing sink. People sitting on the stairs. A makeshift buffet in a dining room the size of other people's bathrooms. Despite the smallness of our home, my mom always threw big parties. I've tried to carry on that tradition. My first apartment after college was the tiniest one out of all the faculty at the boarding school where I worked. I had an oven that was comparable to the kind easy bake makes. Despite that, I had a party or two. In the house we live in now, we once put the bar in one of the kids' bedrooms. Efficient, yet celebratory. 

And so it's finally time to start writing about Big Parties in Small Places because it's what I know. 

These days we haven't had many opportunities for parties, but we still party. Every meal we make as a family can turn into some kind of celebration....if we let it.