It was a year ago, partway through my bi-weekly Panda Express feast, when I considered ditching my plate of kung pao chicken and cooking for myself on a regular basis.
Don’t get me wrong; Panda hadn’t lost its sweet-yet-spicy muster just yet, and it would be weeks until I gave up Joe’s Burgers. But the fact was I’d had too much fast food throughout my college career. Approaching the Subway counter was routine and the workers at Chipotle recognized me from at least 20 feet away. My rate of unhealthy calorie consumption was beginning to get embarrassing.
This will also be my fourth year in college and dorm food is far from a possibility. If I didn’t start cooking soon, “better late than never” would be long gone. Thus, I thrust myself into the culinary world this summer, spatula first.
How does one jump-start a career in the kitchen? I started by binging “Cutthroat Kitchen” and studying it like a practice final exam. For those unfamiliar, “Cutthroat” is a show that places four chefs in a cooking competition and sabotages their supplies by replacing ingredients or utensils with impossibly difficult substitutes. Most people watch it for entertainment. I was searching for knowledge. Watching professional cooks make ice cream in a cement mixer was hilarious but also inspiring; if they could pull that off, I could make anything I wanted.
For my first recipe, I went with a humble box of mac ‘n’ cheese — you can’t go wrong with Kraft. Simple, right? Wrong. Sure, I boiled the macaroni correctly. But for reasons beyond my current understanding, I ignored the packet of powdery cheese and dumped the noodles into a milky, buttery sauce pan. It was five minutes into my meal when I realized my mac ‘n’ cheese completely lacked cheese.
Not an awesome start.
Maybe the occasional cooking show wasn’t the best form of instruction. I had other resources available that I had ignored. My parents gifted me a cookbook at least 1,000 pages long, but it was more daunting than a film theory textbook. Luckily the geniuses over at Buzzfeed struck gold with Tasty, a Youtube channel that breaks down recipes into bite-sized visual chunks. Maybe it could help a lost soul like me discover his talent. All I needed to do was find a recipe more simple than boxed mac ‘n’ cheese.
That’s an impossible task. But after 15 minutes of browsing, I found a pasta recipe that seemed durable enough to withstand my ineptitude in front of a stove: fettuccine with tomato, broccoli and pesto. Literally all that was asked of me was to boil pasta and cook broccoli and tomatoes, adding a generous cup of pesto.
After a couple hours of pep talking myself into confidence, it turned out really well. Sure, I may have over-pestoed the vegetables to the point of near poisoning, but the meal was edible and healthier than anything I had eaten over the past three years.
Point being: cooking isn’t that scary, and food exists outside the EMU. If a hapless goof like me can whip up some fettuccine, the average student is probably capable of earning a Michelin star. Think outside the pizza box, and the pasta-bilities are endless.