Confessions of a… Formally Shit Cook

 Confessions of a is an anonymous column that looks to unearth viewpoints from unique individuals at Massey University. Each week we will give the spotlight to someone new, so If you think you’ve got an interesting story to tell, please get in touch with Editor@massivemagazine.org.nz  

Confessions of formerly shit cook 

I find it funny – yet touching at the same time – whenever people tell me I ought to start selling the stuff that I bake. Another thing I find funny, and something people don’t seem to believe me whenever I tell them, is that I didn’t really learn how to bake until after I’d started at university. 

I’ve always liked food. Mum used to tell me that I was never a fussy feeder even as a kid; that I quickly progressed from breast milk to baby formula to several different varieties of baby food, until the day came when I could sit at the table, propped up by a pile of cushions, and eat the same stuff my parents were having for dinner. Anyway, the fact that I liked food and was always keen to try something new was good enough. Unfortunately, if one loves to eat, one must eventually learn how to cook. 

To put it frankly, I tried to learn how to cook in the same way I learned how to read: by being forced too. When I moved out of home, I couldn’t rely on an abundance of last night's leftovers, or a mystery Sunday crockpot. When that didn’t work, I tried reading every cookbook, watching every YouTube video, and binging Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.  

After all this reading and watching that flew in one ear, and out the other, I knew that there was only one way to learn: I tried to make everything – and bother the fact that it earned me singed eyebrows and burnt fingertips. 

My work in the kitchen progressed from cakes with scorched bottoms and sunken, molten middles to main courses lacking in seasoning, to breads that were stale the second they left the oven. It wasn’t easy, it was frustrating. But, unlike in most things, I never felt like giving up. I was so obstinate, so obsessed with getting the recipe just right or making it just a little bit better than the original. It had to taste good and look good. People had to like it. 

And the day finally came when I got the recipe right. 

I remember a batch of peanut butter cookies, one of those things that was so simple to make yet I failed time and again to get it right. I remember crossing my fingers as I opened the oven to take out the cookie sheet. Voila: they were perfectly golden, deliciously aromatic, and had a homey, comforting, salty-sweet flavor that made people grab one cookie after another off the rack even as they cooled.  

Nowadays, I like it that I can bake or cook gifts for the people who mean a lot to me as opposed to going to a shop and just picking something off a shelf. I feel that doing so puts a little bit of myself into the gift – be it cake or pie or cookies or even a homemade pasta sauce – and makes it more special.   

When I was putting a seal on a container filled with triple chocolate chunk cookies for a certain person a week before last Christmas, I wondered how he would react to what would probably be an unexpected gift. Then, I suddenly stopped what I was doing and laughed as I realized how far I’d come since those first botched attempts at cooking and baking. The kitchen, at the time, was still filled with the rich smell of Whittakers chocolate, the nutty aroma of cinnamon, and that pleasing fragrance emitted by sugar baked with butter.  

It was then that I accepted the fact that not only did I know how to eat, but I also knew how to cook. 

And I knew how to cook well.