Second question: What do I cook?

[scarlettina]

mevennen asks:
I'm always interested in what people cook. I believe you do cook (from memory of previous posts), and if so, what do you cook?

Well, I do cook...after a fashion. My cooking spans two extremes: cooking that is basic enough to feed me, and cooking that is basic and hearty enough to feed many. There's nothing about my cooking that is anything extraordinary. At all. It keeps me alive.

A basic breakfast, for me, is a hard-boiled egg, a couple of slices of toast, some orange juice and tea. Getting fancy on the weekends could include scrambled eggs with cheese, or an omelette, or maybe oatmeal, with homemade biscuits (thank you, Bisquik!) or challah, if I was enterprising enough the night before to hit the bakery on the way home.

Dinners often consist of -- honestly -- some horrible frozen dinner thing because I'm too tired or impatient to cook. I will occasionally make myself some garlic chicken with pasta, some sort of beef thing (either a hamburger or, on rare occasions, a steak). I don't eat nearly enough fish; in the Pacific Northwest this is a practically a crime punishable by law seeing as how magnificent our fish supply is here. I wouldn't begin to know how to prepare it.

Elaborate meals are saved for when I have people over (which is far rarer than I would like right now) or special occasions. I have a couple of things I pull out for such situations: a lasagna recipe that rarely fails me (though it did recently), or my mother's brisket recipe (food of the gods, from the Old Country). This is a repertoire I'd like to expand. It is entirely too limited.

I'm handicapped by a couple of issues in this area: no one to cook for on a regular basis (I don't count), no real opportunity to learn from my mother when I was young, and time spent on far too many other things. I don't know if cooking will ever really be a priority for me. In my fantasy life, I have time to learn to make some dishes brilliantly and family for whom to cook. It could happen, you know, Some Day.