Learning to Love

I have made a recen realization about myself. I really love to love to cook. It is so relaxing for me to just find a recipe that I know I can follow and get all the ingredients and just cook and the feed people. We had our friends over for dinner Monday night and I made some delicious ham+cheese sliders (that we also had at our wedding) and garlic fries (a la Safeco style). I had never made either of those things before and in total I spent quite a bit of time cooking all of it, but it was fun! And they were both pretty easy recipes and had a lot of down time. 

I'm not saying I'm a good cook, lest you start to believe that I am. I almost burnt the sandwiches and I totally botched the fries. I have this thing where I want the fries to be super skinny so they're cripsy but then they burn and don't taste good at all so I just need to get over myself and cut the fries bigger. But I also learned that if you add enough garlic and oil pretty much anything tastes good, so fries saved and crisis averted. 

Anyway I have learned to love cooking and the way that happened was I learned how to cook. Really until about 2 years ago I would just throw things together and put them in the oven and hope it would work out. It NEVER did. I never thought about cooking, the flavors, consistency, etc. I still have a hard time with it. But once I learned that cooking is really a science (these ingredients actually work together to make your cookies bake correctly and you can tell if it will work by how the dough turns out) everything came together. Once I understood cooking I started to love it. 

I'm still learning and I think I'll be figuring it out for the rest of my life but at least I'm figuring it out instead of giving up. I mean I totally botched all of the cookies I made in high school and I did the same thing last night. The difference between high school Katie and last night Katie was instead of giving up I figured out what I did wrong. I never added enough flour, the dough was always too runny. 

Learning and understanding has made me love cooking. Learning and understanding is the way we start to love. Whether it is people, an activity, or education; once we start to learn and understand something that is when we start to love that thing.