It's no secret that I don't think of myself as a great cook -- or at least, I'm not as good a cook as I am an eater. My mother and my brothers inherited the "inventive chef" gene, but I'm not nearly confident enough to whip up dishes the way they do.
I suppose it doesn't help that when you're single, cooking for yourself can get kind of boring. It also didn't help that when I was younger and my mom was in the kitchen, I'd be in my room with my nose stuffed in a book, and would only come upstairs at the last minute, in time to make salad. (I was always disappointed that there wasn't anything left to saute, which I considered far more exciting; but for some reason I didn't quite work out that offering to help earlier might someday work to my benefit. Plus, no doubt my mother didn't trust her clueless bookworm anywhere near the stove. I wouldn't have.)
The fact that I have to follow recipes, and often have to keep consulting them even after I've made a dish multiple times, always struck me as an essential cooking failure. Still, I know the basics -- "how to boil water," etc. -- and it wasn't until recently that I understood that knowing even that much sets me apart from people who don't cook at all.
Years ago, when I met my friend Lydia, she professed that she didn't cook. Since then, she's taken numerous cooking classes, and in fact I've eaten one of the gourmet meals she learned how to make -- it was delicious. But when we shared a vacation rental in Barbados, I noticed that there were certain fundamentals that weren't part of her cooking vocabulary, like how some vegetables might cook at different speeds. It occurred to me that when it comes to learning how to cook, there's nothing quite like doing the boring basics repeatedly, not to mention trying things a lot, and failing a lot (and oh, I fail a lot).
Lydia was in search of a project, so I suggested she learn how to make one of the simplest, most wonderful dishes there is to make: roast chicken. It's not the easiest thing to master. I've made a lot of roast chicken in my day, and I can do it off-book, but I'm always looking for new ways to do it, and I still fail at it one out of every three times. I remembered that my younger brother (a great cook) once told me he was making a roast chicken every week, just to perfect the technique.
Lydia and I have agreed on this: Every week, she'll have to make a roast chicken from a recipe I will send her. She has to make whatever sides I dictate, too. Supplying her with any number of recipes won't be a problem, as I've got loads of them clipped and bookmarked. The problem for me will be narrowing it down to just four. (I already know what the last one is going to be -- and if you know me, then you know what it's going to be, too.) After she's made those four roast chicken recipes, she'll have to roast a chicken by herself, with no recipe at all.
We started with the basic recipe that I use as my go-to, Thomas Keller's "Favorite Simple Roast Chicken." There's really nothing to it, the only quirk being that he uses high heat to roast, whereas not all such recipes do. I also love that he waxes rhapsodic about eating a wing and the chicken butt immediately, which I totally do standing up at the cutting board, and now no longer have to feel guilty about (Thomas Keller does it, too! and he's a master!).
I gave Lydia her assignment, which was to make the chicken along with two sides, in this case roasted potatoes and green beans. And she had to document the process with pictures and descriptions, which she did, texting me photos and commentary at every step. Will she learn, not just during this first step of the cooking project, but over the next four installments? We'll see. And if you have any roast chicken recipes you think she absolutely has to try, let me know in the comments. Note: I'm giving her a pass this next week, since it's Christmas.
So now I'll turn the blog over to guest blogger Lydia and her pictures and texts. Take it away, Lydia! (I cut out most of what I texted back, but my occasional commentary is in green.)
[Ed. note: Next time, she doesn't get to use a thermometer.]
[Ed. note: I forgot to take a screengrab of this text, but here Lydia informed me that she'd decided to make "spicy blackened green beans."]
So how do you think Lydia did? For a first try, I think she did pretty well, myself.
