Anyway, I have a limited range of things I can make and most
of what I can do successfully---like a pot roast dinner or chili---you can’t make
for one person living alone. So here I am, a widow with time on her hands and a
new plan. I’m going to teach myself how to do things in the kitchen and at
least once a week I’m actually going to make a meal using an ingredient or
method I’ve never tried before. As my mother used to say, you’re never too old
to learn something new. I’m not sure if she was talking about me or the dog but,
what the heck, this is my story so I can tell it any way I want. Jeez, now that I
think about it what she actually said was, “You can’t learn any younger. Just do
it!” I was a stubborn child.
As I mentioned in my 2/15/13
post I went to my first ‘cooking for one’ class at the senior center. But one thing
the dietitian teaching the class said won’t leave my thoughts. She said when cooking
for one you have to rethink what your conception of what a meal is. A meal, she
said, can be something as simple as guacamole on whole wheat crackers with a
baked pear for dessert. This was a startling concept for me to wrap my head
around, having grown up in an era when a home-cooked dinner always had to have
meat, potatoes, vegetables, bread and dessert and later on having hung around
Don’s family full of gourmet cooks. But her comment got me wondering if I can actually
come up with a month’s worth of recipes to serve one that are easy-to-make dinners.
After class I stopped by the store and bought my second ever
avocado to test the dietitian’s premise. When I cut the avocado open the way the
she did in class it dawned on me why I had so much trouble opening a mango I
tried doing a while back. I was trying to use the same method of cutting all
the way around it then twisting the two halves to free it from the pit. But mangoes don’t have a nice round ball-like pit like an avocado and all I did was
create a mess. Color me embarrassed. I haven’t tried opening a mango since. Someone
should tell the gods of fruit to start growing them all with peels like
bananas. I'm sure we'd all eat more fruit if they did.
One thing I’ve already figured out by reading recipes that
are supposed to serve just one or two is often times you still have to buy
ingredients in larger quantities than you’ll use. What’s a widow living alone supposed
to do with a left-over ½ a can of something or seven tortilla shells? Get a
deep-freezer the size of Rhode Island?
Oh, my God, now I remember one of the reasons why I hate cooking: wastefulness. I need to
watch more episodes of the Iron Chef hoping
they can brain-wash me into throwing more stuff out. Have you ever noticed how often they
discard ingredients that aren’t the perfect size, color or quality? Those
people would die of culinary shock at my house where this “cook” has been
programmed to eat what I burn because children in China
will starve to death if I waste anything. Bottom line: my widow’s kitchen is
now open for business so if you have any tips or tricks send them my way. ©
P.S. Here’s my first tip: Don’t order a cooking for one cookbook
for your Kindle. Sometimes you actually need real pages to thumb through and an
index you can get at easily.
