Can an old man learn to cook from a meal-kit? I gave it a try...

 AboutAnything  | Greg McComb

Photo by author: Greg McComb

    About a year ago - maybe more - I ordered food from a meal kit service, Goodfood.  Not sure exactly how long ago, the last year has been a bit of a pandemic blur.

    It was delivered to the front-door in a brown box with three large bags inside. Each bag had all the ingredients (meat, vegetables, spices etc.) for two meals, one for myself and the other for my skeptical wife of 35 years. Skeptical because she didn't believe I could learn to cook. 

    I feel a bit guilty when I dump the contents of these bags on the counter. While most people spend hours shopping in grocery stores and lugging bags of food home -- I get all the right food in one bag; measured to perfection by a chef and his staff in Montreal, Canada.  In the past, I have spent hours getting lost and frustrated at my local supermarket when given a short list of items by my wife. She, however, seems to know where everything is, aisle-by-aisle. My wife must have a sixth sense.
  

Although I'm getting better at it, at first I didn't recognize many of the ingredients in the bags, especially the pastas.  Some have funny-complex names. Take squid ink fettuccine; which I used in a shrimp dish a few months back. The question begs: why would you name anything squid ink?  Other pastas I've cooked include spaghetti alla chitarra, cavatelli, radiatore and others. 

 Over time, I learned to pronounce pasta names, and the different regions of Italy they come from. But I really wasn't into it. Just different shapes of dough extruded from the extruder thingy. 

  That was until I discovered bucatini, pasta with a hole-in-the-middle that absorbs your simmering sauce, turning it into a long-thin ravioli. Super tasty, (pictured above). I don't know who in Italy discovered this trick, but it worked.  I'm hooked.

But I digress... 

Photo by author: Greg McComb

     The best part of the meal kits are the colorful 8 x 10 inch recipe cards with step-by-step instructions on how to cook each meal, (see above). Nice pictures, detailed descriptions. A little like paint-by-numbers, I thought. Easy peasy. 

   A quick tip. Use a little painter's tape to attach recipe cards to a cupboard - at eye-level - in the area you are cooking in. Otherwise, they get all mucked up with sauces and will tear. A second tip, punch holes in your recipe cards and create an indexed binder, (see pic above). As you get better at cooking, you may want to try a few recipes on your own. The binder allows for you to reference the recipes quickly, better than the messy stack of cards I had accumulated and put in the corner. My wife also marks the meals she likes with stars; I do too.

  So, what about my first crack at a Goodfood meal, a pandemic year ago? My first thought was to approach cooking a bit like a science project: closely follow the instructions - step-by-step - and the meal will turn out perfect.  As real cooks know, this doesn't happen. I soon found out that to become a decent cook, you need a unique set of skills.  A little like golfing, you duff the ball a lot before finally hitting a decent shot off the tee. I duffed my meals a lot in the first few months.

  So, what are those skills?  Like a golf club, you need to handle a knife with expertise. The bag of food you get from a meal kit service is real food - raw onions, yams, potatoes, garlic etc. - and you need to chop it up quickly and cleanly. Some of those vegetables are hard; so you need a sharp knife. As you are chopping, you also need to organize your output. Goodfood

suggests putting them in a series of mini-bowls; that works well for me. 

   Back to the knife. I started out with an Oneida chef knife, part of a set I got years ago.  It's a decent knife and holds its sharpness pretty well. However, I soon learned certain chef knives have 'cult' status, and cooks can spend several hundred dollars on a decent one, (see link). I became fascinated with Japanese knives: how they are crafted with many layers of Damascus steel melded into an ultra-sharp blade, just millimeters thick. So, I ordered one for Christmas. Nothing to report yet, but feels a little like getting a new toy.

    So, what other skills do you need? Not sure how to categorize this, but I would say frying-pan control. When I say control I mean several things. When I started to cook with Goodfood, I simply turned on the heat to medium, well ahead of time, then dumped my chopped vegetables or meat in.  Of course, they burned. I soon learned you need to carefully

watch your frying pan, every second of your cook. Turn on the heat just before you dump your food in and add some virgin olive oil. Then observe the goings-on in the pan.  Most recipes call for garlic, ginger or onions to simmer first, and become aromatic. I like this; people in the house notice the smell and know dinner is coming soon. Once in, you continually check the heat. A frying pan can easily overheat and burn so I often take it off the burner if I see this happening. This sounds weird but I use a heat-resistant red spatula to move thing around in the pan, regularly skimming the bottom for any signs of burning.  Finally, only a few months back we traded in our aging-chipped Teflon pan for a new-large Lagostina, a top-of-line frying pan for under a hundred bucks. Way cheaper than a knife, and well worth it.

 

   Another important skill is how to handle a cast-iron pot on the stove: to slowly simmer ingredients and spices to make a curry or  dahl, (see video above). In my view, this is the coolest part of the cook and is similar to the way many traditional cultures still prepare meals such as a Dominican sancocho or  Louisiana gumbo. I tried some of these dishes before Goodfood, and they were epic fails. You can't randomly add ingredients into a pot, simmer and expect something good to come of it. What Goodfood taught me was the discipline of an exact recipe and spices, and control of the amounts of the various ingredients. Once you get all these right, you can start the slow simmer and watch the dish come to life as you gently stir. 

  One my recent successes was a chickpea coconut curry with Goodfood, (see video above). I tripled the ingredients in the recipe with extra coconut milk, chickpeas and spinach and simmered it for about 45 minutes, half an hour longer than the recipe called for. I also spiked it with some hot curry powder from our cupboard. The result was a creamy-nutritious broth that was more than the sum of its parts, it was a curry and my family thought it was yummy. 

  Finally, another big advantage of a meal-kit service is that you cook meals from around the world:  pastas from Italy, curries from India, pides from Turkey (see picture at top) and Udon noodles from Asia. You aren't stuck with whatever steak-and-potato dishes handed down through your family tree. Over the last year, I have come to love many of these international dishes and hope to cook (and eat) more in the future. Highly recommend you do the same...

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