What College Has Taught Me Pt. 2
(Pt. 1)
With approximately 2 weeks left of class left, this is probably the best time to reflect on the year. More specifically, this is a good time to detail what my second semester of college has taught me.
While I feigned poise in my first semester, the truth is, the new experiences did rattle me. I mean, some days I didn’t eat at all. How uncharacteristic is that? Looking back, those were perhaps my dumbest moments. Those hours upon hours of moping about being hungry and being immobilized by stomach pains could’ve been spent concocting something vaguely edible. [More on that in Pt.3.]
I have grown over the past 3 months or so. The uncertain future is constantly weighing on my mind, because I lack the passion for food journalism. I don’t lack the passion for food, but there is no mystical ascending staircase for me to just glide up from.And while I’ve all but made up my mind about food journalism, I’m still a disciple in terms of the concept of it all as a whole.
With that, I present some of of the main things I’ve learned:
1. Clarence Birdseye was onto something back in the mid 1920s.
The freezer is my best friend. I am mostly thankful for how well bread freezes. I believe I have about 3-4 loaves of bread chopped into manageable pieces in my freezer at the moment. Just let it thaw, or microwave it for 30 seconds, pop it in the oven to get revitalize it for a bit longer, and it’s just as if it were fresh baked, albeit with a subtle lingering “freezer smell.” Ya’ll know what I mean. It’s nothing terrible, though. Use for sandwiches, a delivery vessel for beef stew, or for anything, really. I made breadcrumbs from them for a beautifully breaded sole filet.
Probably the easiest recipe I can share is one for a steamed fish filet. Couldn’t be easier. Buy those frozen dover sole filets at the supermarket, or any white meat fish. Put it on a plate. Slice some ginger into little tinder sticks, and scatter that on the fish. Take a sprig of green onion and place a few of the green stalks on the fish. Ground some black pepper directly on the fish, then tightly wrap it with plastic wrap. Leave no room for steam to escape. Cook for about 8-11 minutes, depending how crazy your microwave is. The result will be a perfectly cooked filet, with a sauce made of its own juices and the aromatics added. Finish it off with a few dashes of soy sauce, and honestly, you have a restaurant quality dish.
2. Going to a university does not make you any more sophisticated than you were.
Any notion of my culinary outlook broadening as a result of going to Fullerton was stifled the minute I step foot in the city. I’ve documented my disappointment in its food scene before, but honestly, the city has been good to me, and it does not deserve all of the blame.
Living off campus, I’ve cooked about 95% of the meals I consume on a daily basis. In conjunction with student life siphoning nearly all of my vitality, it leaves nothing much in terms of ambition. As a result, the first 16 years of my life spent admiring the Food Network and my brother’s burgeoning cooking skills have been bastardized and subjugated by my sloth and lack of a real pantry. I’ve been trapped on a treadmill all year, chasing a fleeting premise: convenience without the fine print.
3. A slow show allows you to enjoy the theatrics without losing sight of the overarching narrative.
I’ve become extremely fond of slow roasting, braising, and stewing. The effort to reward ratio is unbelievable. It’s understandable that Tony Bourdain throws the concept of “magic” and converting “nothing to something great” almost as often as he throws the F-bomb (almost), but really, he’s emphasizing a very important idea. Something that I’ve grown to appreciate in my time living alone. Cooking is about maximizing the utilities at your disposal. I speak the Bourdain gospel almost verbatim when I say the true measure of a cook is how he/she performs with very little at their disposal. And thus, I’ve adopted that mindset. I may not enjoy what I’m doing, but fuck if I’m going to allow myself to eat a substandard dinner.
For this year’s Super Bowl, I made beef braised in red wine. The beef, tough, chewy bits completely unusable under any other circumstance. The wine? Dude, I didn’t even know where it came from. It was a half empty bottle chilling in my fridge, with the cork floating inside, only plastic wrap covering it from the foreign invaders that surround it. For all I knew, it was rancid. I gave it a whiff (not a smart way to test if something is ‘good’ or not) and it smelled like wine. Fuck it. Emptied the contents and deglazed the saucepan. Cooked out the potentially lethal pathogens, and cooked it down into a rich sauce. It took about 4-5 hours in total, giving me plenty of time to read NFL for Dummies, 2009 edition.
One of the best meals I’ve made for myself. That was with some “Two Buck Chuck” from Trader Joe’s. Imagine if I had some decent wine to work with. If there’s no rush, your best bet is a slow show, because fantastic stuff can happen–whether you’re there to see it or not.
Pt. 3 coming soon.