Beware: Artist in the Kitchen

My husband calls me the Jackson Pollock of the kitchen. Partially, because I improvise and don’t always follow the recipe but mostly, because I make an entire and utter mess of the kitchen while in the process of creating. It’s not like I try to make a mess. I tend to get overly ambitious and have too many things going on at once so I don’t notice a splatter here or there or a drop of sauce on the floor until the guests have left and I’m too tipsy to care.

Have I always been a bit of a nonconformist in the kitchen? Maybe we should try and find my Home Ec teacher from high school, Ms. Carbondale, and ask her. True or false: my father was sent a progress report telling him that I was certain to fail if I didn’t shape up. And the answer is…..True.

Her main complaints: I wasn’t using a knife to level dry ingredients and I wasn’t always paying attention in class. What she failed to understand as a teacher and human being was that I was in a different place than most kids my age. With parents divorced and my sister and me living with my father, dinner generally fell on me to prepare. I didn’t mind it. It’s just that I had already been doing trial and error in the kitchen. I had already followed recipes and figured out how to improve upon them. In a kid’s body, I was already an adult in some ways. I knew how to grocery shop, chop, cook a balanced meal and clean up afterwards. I probably thought she didn’t have much to teach me and truth be told, that was probably correct.

Over time, going to college and graduate school where I didn’t really have to cook, I lost my way in the kitchen a bit. It wasn’t until my husband and I moved to San Jose from Chicago, where I was between “engagements”, that I started making dinner for us. Increasingly, I became more confident. People asked me for my recipes. I began to love the challenge of putting a complex menu together. We started having small dinner parties. Now, in our Seattle home, we can pull off a multi-course meal for twenty without batting an eyelash. It's a true pleasure to cook for and feed those you love and to try new things (we always experiment on our guests!).

Looking at the aftermath of our last dinner party, empty or partially empty wine bottles scattered about, dishes tottering in the sink and the stove and floor caked with indiscernible things, I'm pretty sure that Jackson Pollock would be proud of me.

I’ve learned that cooking is a little part art and a little part science. I lean towards the art side of it. It hasn’t failed me yet. Sorry, Ms. Carbondale. There are more ways than yours to make something shine in the kitchen.