Play With Your Food

Cooking Experiences

I am a scratch cook, which means that if time permits I prefer to create everything in a particular recipe, sauces and spice blends included. The only cooking class I ever attended was an evening hands-on workshop on making sushi, a Christmas gift from my son.

When prepping to cook something I’ve never made before, I read a bunch of recipes and distill my own version from them, revising ingredient volumes and rethinking procedures to create my ideal version of the dish. I am only able to do this because I have always played with my food.

I never set out to achieve my culinary skills and, to be honest, they are far from complete. For instance, I have never made my own pasta — early on I simply didn’t have the counter space and later, when I did, I had discovered a local source for all the fresh varieties I could ever need.

I learned the basics of cooking by feeding my siblings during a two-year hiatus in the US when my father was earning his fifth or sixth university degree and my mother worked in a travel agency. My point is that I was unsupervised, so there was no one to read the rules.

Eggs were my first success, and bacon was a merciless tutor regarding cooking safety. One day, I decided to try making an omelette but there aren’t many fillings a nine year old likes. My solution? Strawberry jam. Go easy on the salt and pepper, though. I loved it and my brothers loved it, but I doubted my parents would approve so we kept it our secret.

Then we moved back to Africa and others cooked my meals. My experience with international cuisines grew (it was my mother’s rule we try something once before we judged it) and, consequently, so did my palate.

Canadian culinary range at the time featured the standard meat and potatoes fare of Europe, and ‘ethnic’ cooking was either Eastern European peasant food or Chinese take-out, maybe Mexican if your city’s population could justify it.

In other words, it was boring. So I started to play again. My mother’s extensive library of cookbooks became my starting point for recipes, but very few ingredients — even spices — were available in Canadian prairie supermarkets, so I experimented with substitutions and work-arounds and, well, never stopped.

Did you know that Thai green curry requires not just any basil, but Thai basil because it has a faint hint of licorice. Thai basil is generally available but not always. In a pinch, the slightest pinch of anise in addition to regular basil will fool most palates. And potato starch provides a much better base for an egg wash to bond to before you bread anything to cook. And speaking of breading, use panko (Japanese-style soft wheat variety) breadcrumbs or better still, crushed cornflakes instead of processing old loaf crusts — it makes a difference.

Batters never seem to end up with that satisfying crispness in restaurant fare, particularly beer batters. Lacking beer on some occasion, I substituted vodka and if you never try any other substitution, you’ll regret it on your death bed if you don’t. Best. Batter. Ever.

Would I have learned these things in culinary school or scrabbling up the ranks in a commercial kitchen? I’m not sure I would, considering I have never encountered references to either of my alternatives above but that’s not even the point.

Cooking, like writing, is a creative endeavor and you get out what you put into it, and rules be damned. If you add frozen veggies to mac-’n-cheese, toss in a couple processed cheese slices as well or grate some cheddar and the kids probably won’t even notice.

One last thing, though. There is absolutely nothing — nothing — that will save burned custard.

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