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Overcoming Phobias And Insecurities Has Felt Empowering and Liberating
Learning to swim and cook have been bigger deals to me than they are for most people
I don’t cook a lot, but I promised my wife I would try to cook at least once a week. Last month, I tried to cook a baked fish recipe. It was actually pretty easy — I needed to coat the fish in a mix of bread crumbs, mayo, and mustard, then put it in the oven for a couple of minutes.
I followed the ingredients to a tee, but made one critical mistake — instead of measuring exactly how much salt and pepper I needed with measuring spoons, I did what literally every other cook I’ve seen do: I estimated and eyeballed how much salt and pepper the fish needed. I coated the fish in salt, listening to my gut on where to stop instead of using a measuring spoon.
As you can imagine, the fish was incredibly salty, to the point where it was almost inedible. Every other part of the fish turned out fine, but I had to eat it with rice so the salt could spread around. My wife could not eat it because it was way too salty for her, and when I told her what I did, she said people I’ve seen cook, including her and my parents, are experienced and have cooked hundreds if not thousands of meals. They can just eyeball how much salt a particular dish needs, but until I became more experienced, I needed to follow the explicit directions of the recipe.
It was a beginner’s hiccup, but I have been trying to cook more often instead of relying on frozen foods, my wife’s cooking, really simple dishes of pasta and meat sauce or eggs. It is an area of my life where I’m a beginner but getting better — I just made soup as well from a chicken soup recipe and it tasted pretty good. I also grilled steak for the first time recently too, and got pretty good feedback on it. I am trying to make it more of a routine and build my capacity. For the most part, I realize cooking is largely pretty easy if you have the ingredients and the recipe — you just follow the directions, and if you don’t know how to do something, YouTube is always available.
I do wish I cooked more when I was younger, as it’s an obvious adult skill that I have not mastered or come close to mastering yet. I regret to admit that when I was…
