Learning to Cook: An Art I Neglected for 26 Years

I'm not normally a procrastinator. More likely, I'm apt to have an assignment done with plenty of time to spare and my to-do list cleared off. But there's one area I've discovered--only now--where these over-achiever tendencies did not translate, and I wish they had.

You see, for 26 years I never really learned how to cook.

I can decorate a house, whip up some crafts, even bargain-shop to my heart's delight. But this other facet of the art of homemaking never seemed all that important to me...until now.

Growing up, I had an Easy Bake Oven and even a little candy-making kit. But even then, the  process was all about the end result rather than enjoying the process. That mindset--that cooking is little more than a means to an end--has haunted me ever since. In college, I subsisted on granola bars, cheese crackers, easy mac and tacos. As I moved from apartment to apartment in the years following, I'd add a couple new items to my menu-repertoire (like veggie burgers and baked potatoes), but little "real cooking."

To me, cooking took too long and too many ingredients. All the recipes for things I wanted to try were so complicated. Grocery shopping was the bane of my existence, exasperating me as I meandered the aisles trying to find the simplest things on my list. From my perspective, it wasn't worth the effort it took. And let's be completely honest here: I was intimidated by it. I'd never learned how to cook, so I never attemped to learn. It was a self-perpetuating cycle.

That is, until I got married and now had someone else to think of. Even though Michael has is easy to please and would be content with a revolving schedule of pizza-spaghetti-chicken, as a new wife, cooking now took on new meaning. Suddenly, now it mattered to me. But I was (and, often, still am) lost about where to start, seeing as I never did. It has felt a bit like a mad scramble to make up for lost time and overcome my lack of a home-ec education.

The last six months have been an attempt to brush up in this area. Especially in anticipation that someday it will not just be me and Michael, but a whole family. That's quite a responsibility, and as I've come to realize, learning to cook--and learning to enjoy to cook--takes time. So I'll start learning now, so that someday I really do enjoy it.

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