Learning to Cook, Part 1

Grocery shopping in Washington Heights.

I love to eat but I have never had to understand how food was made or cook it myself. I am 33 years old. In other countries, at other times, I would have died by now. People have always cooked for me, from my mother who, until I went away to college, brought breakfast on a tray to my room; packed thoughtful, nutritious lunches in brown paper bags; and made either stir fry or hearty Midwestern fare for dinner while I did homework in a faraway room, to the series of men in my life.

At 15, I immediately went to Jay's after school and often stayed past dinnertime. His father was a long-haul trucker and his mother, absent, so he was poor, and fried up hamburger meat -- I remember the oil scars all over his hands and wrists. But for a teenager like me, so helpless in the kitchen, and helpless, pretty much, only there, hamburger meat was brilliant stuff. In college, a Marxist vegetarian became my beau. I was a self-diagnosed Celiac, so our meatless, wheatless diet largely consisted of squash, onion and rice drowning in Bragg's amino acid when we ate at my pseudo-commune off-campus, where ingredients came from a weekly shipment from the farm coop, or egg and potato-heavy breakfast tacos doused with cheap hot sauce when we graduated and lived in Washington Heights. Our main staple, limes, were 10 for a dollar.

I tasted freedom in the form of Amy's pizzas and cheap wine when I took a paid internship with National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. I worked nights at my first job in Miami, so ordered delivery with the rest of the night crew. On my nights off, I ate with my boyfriend, whose obsession with fitness and perennial bachelorhood lent themselves to oven-baked chicken breast and wilted spinach, nothing exotic but still much more than I could cook, which was nothing.

I moved to New York, my income rose, and, like any New Yorker, I ate out as much as my wallet and stomach could stand. I recall a very disappointing pork chop attempt when my sister visited my Brooklyn studio, a garden-facing front room of a Carroll Gardens brownstone with a tin ceiling and micro-appliances. When I foolishly organized Easter lunch, hoping she would take care of the food, she instead shouted directions at me from the couch. I recall the bountiful amounts of Belgian beer and not the food, with reason, no doubt.

In the next installment, how I lived in four different countries while still being unable (unwilling?) to cook.