All my knowledge of cooking comes from a lifetime in the kitchen with family. My grandmother, my mother, my father, my chef friends, my farmer friends, you name it – if I can glean something from them I will.
Many lessons have been learned through trial and error which I suppose is a good way to learn. I’ve made many mistakes and continue to make many mistakes (you should have seen my Korean song pyeon I tried to make the other day, I don’t even wanna talk about it). I thought I’d begin a series of things I’ve learned along the way and subject you to some bad illustrations I painted. Sometimes you just have to step away from the camera and change things up a bit. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Matt's Kitchen Wisdom Volume 1.
Kitchen Thermometers Are Your Friends.
There was a time when I tried to wing everything. The result? Soggy fried foods, destroyed melted sugar gloop, burnt butter (which isn’t a bad thing exactly but you know what I’m saying). And since deep frying plays a big part of On a Stick!, it’s important to know your temperatures and know when you’re where you want to be.
I didn't really think much about food and what went into making a nice meal until I was somewhat forced to learn how to cook when I was laid off (again) about ten years ago. I needed something to do with my free time and felt like I should contribute something to the household, since I was no longer bringing in any dough, so to speak. While I had certainly thrown things together over the years, this was a new quest to eat better and see if time and effort really made a difference.
Here in California we love to brag about our abundance of wonderful seasonal ingredients and how that makes good food easy. That's more or less true, but I have to confess that I've also always had a sneaking admiration for those cooks who can whip up something from nothing.
I LOVE risotto. It's one of the many things I had never eaten before I moved to California. Never even heard of it in my two decades of growing up in Western Massachusetts. I know that seems hard to believe,
but I made my parents risotto when they came out to visit 5 years ago
and they had no idea what it was. Seriously. Italian food growing up
was lasagna, pasta with red sauce or pizza. I can't remember the first
risotto I ever ate, but I know I was instantly hooked because it's the
dish I always order whenever I see it on the menu...or hear it as the
special. I just can't help myself. I love the creamy, chewy consistency
of it, the homeyness, the endless possibilities. It's a dish I make at
least 3-4 times a month, as it's fairly simple and hard to screw up. Or
so I thought. Apparently, I've been serving it all wrong.
Not only do I find the word linguine the most attractive to pronouce: lingweeeeeeneh – I also reckon its shape is one of the most appealing of all pastas when wrapped around the tongue. Curiously, linguine is a rare pasta within the indexes of most of the reputable Italian cookbooks I have, but when I finally found a brief description, the gist of it seemed to suggest flattened spaghetti. And, in fact, that is exactly what it is: not as wide as fettuccine or tagliatelle, but a bit thicker than trenette. And trenette is often understood to be the most favored pasta for dressing with pesto.
