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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

A home-cook is truly an extraordinary person

Out in the commercial world of food production, there are bakers who specialize solely in the precision of baking. There are confectioners, who spend their days making candy. We have companies whose only products are jams and jellies. There are pickle manufacturers, pasta sauce producers, and yogurt factories. You can go into your grocery store deli and buy a perfectly-roasted chicken.


All these different specialties of food producers have a few things in common that aid them in turning out consistently good products. They have equipment that is specific to their industry. They spend their days perfecting their craft, be it baking, jam and jelly making, or roasting meat. And they are "at work", meaning there are no outside distractions, like bandaging the skinned knee of a child, answering the ringing door bell, or taking that all-important phone call.


The home-cook doesn't go to any special school to learn their craft. We don't receive any noteworthy training. We are self-taught, by trial and error, and by reading cookbooks.


For myself, I don't own a chicken rotisserie, a flash freezer, a marble slab for baking and confection-making, or a wood-fired, brick pizza oven. What I have is an ordinary home oven, a freezer that makes funky sounds, and an assortment of pots and pans that look more like the shelves at Value Village, than the shelves at Williams-Sonoma.


Every afternoon, I have a 2-hour window for getting dinner made, laundry folded, homework supervised (okay, not so much supervision now that the kids are older), and daughters driven to their late afternoon dance classes.


And yet, I still manage to churn out an interesting, mostly delicious and nutritious meal, night after night. This is something to take pride in.


If you're the home-cook in your household, give yourself a huge pat on the back for the work that you do. You have likely spent years developing your skills and abilities to work under less than perfect conditions. Any professional chef or pastry-maker would likely complain loudly to the management, if made to work with less than industry-standard equipment. And yet, we do this night after night in our own kitchens.

We really shouldn't be so hard on ourselves when something we've made in our home kitchen, with imperfect equipment and numerous distractions, turns out less than perfectly. In truth, we are doing an extraordinary job.
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