A Fear Of Cooking

  Jon and I have agreed to learn to cook. I mean really cook. No Hamburger Helper or Ragu, but real cooking with real ingredients.
 Our agreement is, we will each learn a new recipe and serve it one night a week. Then we will cook something together one night a week and if we are successful, we will have a dinner party once a month. It's not a competition, but I am going to win. Jon will cook weird stuff, like his Russian goulash that had cinnamon as a main ingredient. I still think his cookbook had a page missing between goulash and cinnamon toast.
 But, I will have to actually read the many cookbooks I own and try to learn something from them.. Until now, my favorite has been the White Trash  cookbook, where all the recipes begin with canned soup and Velveeta or a cake mix. Although, I would never make the fried squirrel dish it recomends, as squirrels are way too cute to eat. My mother taught me a little about frying. When I was in Girl Scouts, my brother in-law, Si, came for dinner, expecting my mothers wonderful fried chicken and chocolate cake, only to find an eleven year old working on her cooking badge. Hopefully he has forgotten this by now.

 I will have to learn what some of those strange ingredients are and where to buy them. I'll learn about goat and other cheeses, and what they pair well with.
 I know I can do do this. Way back in the 80's, my favorite wine was, well, not wine. I hated wine in fact. One of our good friends was working on his PHD, and wanted to learn about wine so he would not feel so backwoods around the other professors. He started showing up at all hours with different wines for us to taste. At first I refered to all reds as esraser wines, as they reminded me of chewing on the eraser end of a pencil. After time or age, or whatever you want to call it, I developed a taste for red wine. In fact I prefer it to all other adult libations. The only good advice my doctor ever gave me, in the midst of all that fresh air and sunshine crap she harped on was, to have a glass of red wine every night. It's good for my heart in more ways than one.