Moose in the Kitchen

I pore over cookbooks with the same avid, drooling pleasure as a 15-year-old with a stash of Playboys. I haunt bookstores, stroking the cookbooks and frightening the salespeople. I comb the internet searching for new recipes. When I find one, I print it out and stash it away for when I simply can’t survive another moment without oatmeal pancakes, lentil soup or orange chocolate cake.

Don’t be fooled. I am not a good cook. At best, I am a novice. At worst, I am a danger to society. In college, I emptied out a 12-story dorm at two in the morning because I burned a pot of rice. I almost set my head on fire trying to light a gas stove. But I have also managed to make good fried chicken, tasty soup and some damn fine cookies.

As someone who likes to believe herself independent, it seems ridiculous to depend on good restaurants (and other people’s credit cards) to serve me tasty food. I want to serve my own tasty food. One of my new pleasures is inviting people over and making them my guinea pigs. There is a distinction here. I make them my guinea pigs, I don’t serve them my guinea pigs. I don’t even have guinea pigs. If I did, I assure you, I wouldn’t cook them up for dinner. (Besides I haven’t gotten that far. Recipes for Braised Guinea Pig are probably quite tricky.)

Stuffing a chicken is far more entertaining when there are people to mercilessly mock you for trying to shove the burnt end of the bird under some convenient asparagus. That’s where you come in. You, the people of the internet and you, my inanimate cooking blog. I am slowly teaching myself to cook. I will chronicle that process here – fires, salmonella and all.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, even though you don’t get to eat the fruits of my pained labors. Though given the disaster potential, you probably prefer it that way.