I didn’t think that expanding my cooking horizons would be
so difficult. To the average male couch potato whose culinary talents involved
frozen pizza, macaroni and cheese, and an occasional breakfast scramble on
weekends, cooking is not second nature.
But with a cupboard full of cookbooks, shouldn’t I be able to figure it out?
Not so fast.
The very first thing I learned was that cooking takes planning, and a lot of shopping. So I can plan, but shop? Me? I wander around a grocery store like a rat stuck in a maze. I have absolutely no idea where to find anything unless I get lucky enough to see it on one of the isle boards. It is painful, stressful, and aggravating. I am an in and out kind of guy… you know… straight to the beer and out of the store in a blink of an eye. Perchance I am looking for something other than beer, when confronted with 10 different brands of the same thing I grab randomly, no label reading for me. But I definitely need to find my way around the store.
During my first week of cooking alone I must have made 5 or 6 trips to the store just for spices. It would have been a lot more efficient to look through the next weeks of recipes, and buy them all at once. Newbie mistake. I think the spice situation is under control for now, but man, spices are expensive! I seriously considered ordering online and grinding my own. And maybe once I see which ones are flying out of the cupboard, I will, but for now, time is of the essence.
So my first cooking priority was to season that Weber Smokey Mountain a bit. I did that by throwing some brauts on and smoking them up. I just used one of those name brand brauts and didn’t follow a recipe. My wife has some roots in Wisconsin, and I did get some tips on how to cook a braut properly, but I mainly wanted to start to season the smoker so I just tossed them on. They came out fine, though a little bland for my taste.
On to the next item. I picked out some kind of pork to smoke, and headed off to Costco to try to get what I wanted, only to reminded again that at Costco, you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. Whatever I was looking for, they didn’t have, and I ended up with a pork loin. I cooked the pork loin a bit long and it came out edible, but slightly dry.
My next mission… homemade pizza on the grill! I bought a pizza stone from Amazon, had my recipe ready, what could possible go wrong? What indeed.
But with a cupboard full of cookbooks, shouldn’t I be able to figure it out?
Not so fast.
The very first thing I learned was that cooking takes planning, and a lot of shopping. So I can plan, but shop? Me? I wander around a grocery store like a rat stuck in a maze. I have absolutely no idea where to find anything unless I get lucky enough to see it on one of the isle boards. It is painful, stressful, and aggravating. I am an in and out kind of guy… you know… straight to the beer and out of the store in a blink of an eye. Perchance I am looking for something other than beer, when confronted with 10 different brands of the same thing I grab randomly, no label reading for me. But I definitely need to find my way around the store.
During my first week of cooking alone I must have made 5 or 6 trips to the store just for spices. It would have been a lot more efficient to look through the next weeks of recipes, and buy them all at once. Newbie mistake. I think the spice situation is under control for now, but man, spices are expensive! I seriously considered ordering online and grinding my own. And maybe once I see which ones are flying out of the cupboard, I will, but for now, time is of the essence.
So my first cooking priority was to season that Weber Smokey Mountain a bit. I did that by throwing some brauts on and smoking them up. I just used one of those name brand brauts and didn’t follow a recipe. My wife has some roots in Wisconsin, and I did get some tips on how to cook a braut properly, but I mainly wanted to start to season the smoker so I just tossed them on. They came out fine, though a little bland for my taste.
On to the next item. I picked out some kind of pork to smoke, and headed off to Costco to try to get what I wanted, only to reminded again that at Costco, you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. Whatever I was looking for, they didn’t have, and I ended up with a pork loin. I cooked the pork loin a bit long and it came out edible, but slightly dry.
My next mission… homemade pizza on the grill! I bought a pizza stone from Amazon, had my recipe ready, what could possible go wrong? What indeed.
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