I Didn't Start Cooking for Love

I didn’t start cooking for love. A nasty Excel file told me Uber Eats and going out to eat were killing my savings, and I could stop both immediately — so I did. Luckily I was single by then, separated, and my decision was not going to affect the rest of the family (yet). There was nothing noble in it either, it was just capitalism putting a hand on my back and my pocket, pushing me into walking into my own kitchen, kind of annoyed about it at the beginning. The most soulless motivator, if I’m being blunt about it.

At the beginning there were mostly the basics, the staples. My boring chicken breast, a name that my eldest put on my chicken. I remember him saying to me “mano, ponle seasoning a esto, this shit is so bland”. Fair. I had just started my cooking journey and chicken had always been hit-or-miss for me. From that bland chicken forward, poco a poco comencé a cocinarlo todo. I started racking up serious hours, cooking absolutely everything. I remember promising myself, if you want to eat cake, you have to cook it. So just like that, I was cooking everything and anything I could think of, starting from the basics and foundational recipes.

For that I had two books at first. Bittman’s How to Cook Everything for the general grammar of the thing, and Valldejuli for my own people’s recipes, the classics. I opened these books constantly because I could not hold a ratio in my head then and I still can’t. Valldejuli’s is still there on the kitchen counter, kinda-hidden to not get flak from the missus, but it’s there. The basics, which I think I’ve learned correctly, have stuck with me, my broken memory kept, and it kept it without me asking, the whys of cooking and the whys of the basics of cooking. Why you pat a chicken breast dry before it goes anywhere near heat. Why salt needs 15, 20, 30 minutes to do its actual job instead of sitting on the outside tasting like salt. Why 325°F gives a beginner a much wider margin than 400°F does, which matters enormously when your margin is the only thing standing between dinner and a chancleta (rubber sandal). Why ajíes dulces are not optional and recao is not cilantro and a cube of sofrito out of the freezer means the caldero starts with an advantage before you’ve done anything.

Those basics stuck. The foundations stacked fast, ideas leaking into each other the way learning always does when you stay with one thing long enough — and cooking is where I proved it with my hands instead of arguing it in my head. Heat is physics, right? It behaves a certain way and keeps behaving that way, and so does salt, and so does time, and so does fat, and once four or five things behave predictably you can guess at the sixth and be roughly right, and roughly right with a hot cast-iron skillet in front of you and hungry people in the house is most of dinner.

Somewhere around the first juicy tender chicken breast I actually wanted to cook, my reason changed. I could’ve kept ranting about not being able to go out to eat out of necessity, or complained about how fucking insane grocery prices are right now, but the practice still has its desires and parameters, and requires a specific effort that is rough, the price is there. The reason, and the reasoning, and the whys for the experience itself changed, and so I stopped cooking because of the money and necessity and kept cooking because the food is so fucking good.

The hours kept stacking anyway. I was lifting and running by then too, so the stove and the whole-food fridge just lined up — nothing noble, just convenient timing. But yeah, all of this started because of this economy — and what those hours actually bought was not really the money. Somewhere around 8,000 of them in by rough math now, and I’d check that number before I bet money on it, but the idea holds: it was another Tuesday of arroz con pollo for my babies and ladies, and it was delicious, and it brought us together.

The idea of a used or active home kitchen is romantic; fluency behind it is not. I’m flowing through prep and cleanup, dancing to whatever’s on — Peeling Flesh, Juan Luis Guerra, Coltrane yesterday. The music helps literally, not as metaphor — a song is a clock you can dance to. Ænema for a short boil, Pneuma when you’ve got a while, no? Stack enough hours that way and the movement starts looking mechanical, expert, because that’s what practice does to you.

As you go, chicken stops being hard to cook with, and each ingredient is studied with these hands. You’ll know when you are there, when you finally feel fluent with that piece of butter. My cooking is nowhere near art or expert. I am a studied beginner, a caveman cook, but I can produce my recipes on a Tuesday when I’m wrecked or on a Sunday for guests, because of the stacking. Funnily enough, having sofrito sitting in cubes in the freezer honestly beats most of the productivity systems I’ve implemented at work. I told somebody recently that my cooking is dead simple, and then, being who I am, I went and opened my own recipe notes to prove it. Well. There’s a paragraph in there explaining that a chicken breast is a wedge and what butterflying is actually for. There’s a note about pulling meat at 155 to 158 because carryover finishes the job. There’s a whole section on freezing raw portions, and not forgetting to sharpie the dates on each. So yeah, granted, to me my cooking is dead simple now because repetition just makes complicated things feel simple from the inside. Dead simple, sure. I wrote a paragraph about wedges.

Back in the day, cooking was really the only way to get our teenager out of his room — these days my family materializes out of the walls when there’s something on the stove. I make cornbread, gluten-free, out of a bag, nothing heroic. I make the magic brownies, IYKWIM, and the adults in my life have a very pleasant evening and bring it up for a week afterward. My kids eat things I made with my hands. The tiniest mac and cheese, made by somebody who cared for 12 minutes, is going to get in your body in a way the purchased version probably never will. Es una bendición, de verdad.

I’m pickier about eating out now, and I know how that sounds. It’s a coin flip for me anyway. It’s a 50/50 chance whether I spend the rest of the day bloated and regretting it. Most of what’s out there is garbage, and yes, I know I sound like an insufferable person saying that, and I’ve eaten plenty of it happily so I’m not putting myself above anyone by saying this, it’s just the resentment and contempt seeping out. I’m 39 now, I’m minimizing my FAFO. I wasn’t always this picky. I lived in Miami for over 12 years and ate at all sorts of restaurants, and the expensive ones with no gimmicks, just the food, were unbelievable in flavor. Funny to think I could afford them then, or thought I could, jaja. Those chefs run the same fundamentals I’m trying to run, except they’ve run them 10,000 times more than I have, in a clean room, with product that came in that morning. A cook who has broken down the same fish 400 times and is frankly bored of it, that’s craft doing the work, and luxury is just what they get to charge for it.

The caldero and the DIY were supposed to be budget instruments. They’re some of the best and tastiest parts of my week now. I keep going because of what the food does to a house.

Me voy a comer un arroz con pollo que cociné anoche.