What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [63]
“I like this dish because I’ve never had a bad batch. I’ve had subpar ones, but even they taste pretty good, plus it’s really easy.” Then Brooke mentions other riffs on Southwestern foods and flavors. “I absolutely adore anything vaguely lime-flavored that I can roll up in a tortilla with sour cream, salsa, black olives, Cheddar cheese, and lettuce!” Clearly, tortilla-wrapped foods have become quite unmoored from their origins, but Brooke’s repertoire isn’t limited to Tex-Mex flavors. Compromise born of the wish to please another has its advantages it turns out. Brooke’s wife prefers Mediterranean foods, so Brooke’s repertoire has expanded to include dishes that aren’t based on salsa, cheese, and beans. But regardless of what he’s cooking, he credits those two nights a week his parents had him make dinner for giving him his sense of ease in the kitchen today and his ability to go beyond what he ate as a kid.
Tom Anderson is another young adult who cooks. Credit goes to his mother, Doe, for setting a good table and teaching Tom how to cook.
“I remember noticing when I was in the seventh or eighth grade,” Tom tells me, “that dinner at a friend’s house consisted of steamed carrots and chicken breasts. It was pretty bland. I realized then how much better a cook my mother was. I think we took it for granted for a long time. But I’ve noticed it more since going to college and eating dorm food, which wasn’t that bad. But let’s face it, mass-produced food is nothing like home cooking.”
Tom is twenty-three. He has been working in a laboratory in a Boston hospital and will be going to medical school soon. While some kids start to cook in college, for most it’s not the moment. School is demanding and kids are busy. “Throughout school there was no time,” explains Tom, “so it became a habit not to spend time on things like preparing food. After college and after moving into an apartment, I realized that I had time, but it didn’t occur to me immediately to get up from my computer and cook. It wasn’t until I saw myself ordering yet another jumbo chicken parm and a jumbo meatball sandwich to eat over four nights running that I called my mom and said, ‘I’ve decided to start cooking. Could I come over for a tutorial?’”
For his first dish, Tom chose to make one of his favorites, a mushroom risotto, while his mother zeroed in on a less ephemeral dish of baked pasta.
“We went shopping, came home, and cooked,” says Tom. “We ate the risotto for dinner, and I got to take home the pasta dish. Next we made minestrone, then I made it on my own, only I added sausage and tortellini—it’s really thick! It’s amazing to be able to customize what I’m making. I can decide that I like corn, so I’m going to add a lot, or I like my sausage cut differently than in rounds. Ah, freedom!” (His mom, however, thinks his minestrone is a little over the top with both ravioli and sausage going in there.)
After a month Tom had cooked the following foods: “Minestrone. I’ve made guacamole three times—it’s my mom’s recipe. It’s really good. I’ve made chicken quesadillas eight times (he starts with a chicken breast, flattens it, then sears it), and chicken carbonara once. That was the weakest. I had more noodles than anything else. The egg was chunkier than I thought it would be, and I didn’t have enough bacon and peas. I cooked all the parts myself, but I need to do it again. And I just made the minestrone again. I was amazed. Even shopping at Whole Foods it cost fifteen dollars to make. That’s three meals worth—it seemed like a bargain to me.”
Even in the face of something as daunting as medical school, Tom plans to keep up his cooking. “I think I can take a few hours off every few nights to do something good and healthy for myself—cooking and working out.” And he probably will, because, “One thing about cooking,” Tom says, “is that you really appreciate the leftovers. They’re so much better than takeout.”
Despite the pressures of college, one young man we know bought himself a set of good pots and pans as soon as he got to MIT and is now