Feb 21st, 2019
I’m not sure why I decided to start my culinary career with fried chicken, but as so many of my friends love to remind me, it makes for a good story. Of course, being the idiot freshmen that we were, we started the chicken with no idea of what to do. One person poured flour all over the chicken wings, while I filled the pot half full with oil (half? really?) and turned the heat to high. Another friend cracked eggs on the chicken, and slathered the mix all over.
Did I know that oil was not supposed to bubble when it’s hot enough? No. Did I bother to find out? No. I just kept heating it, blissfully remembering Bangalore KFC and eagerly anticipating the meal I was about to have. If too many chefs spoil the broth, then what too many inexperienced freshmen would do to the broth seems obvious.
As the temperature of the oil got higher and higher, it began to hiss and spit, shooting sizzling drops all around the pan. Taking this as a good sign, I quickly dropped a wing into the pot.
Two things happened. The chicken wing dropped into the oil, splashing a fair amount out of the pan and onto the stove, where it immediately started to smoke. Second, this chicken wing, one of ten, was cooked through in just about six seconds. Knowing nothing about how fast chicken was supposed to cook, we took it as a good sign that our dinner would be ready to go in under two minutes. As I lifted the wing out of the pot, I noticed the smoke from the oil around it. And then I noticed that my chicken wing, coming out of the boiling oil into the room temperature kitchen, began to go up in smoke.
I’m still not entirely sure whether it was the oil or the chicken that set off the fire alarm. The piercing blare cleanly cut through my excitement, and my blood froze. I sprinted out of the dorm with my friends into a sea of grumbling evacuating students in their pyjamas and hid in the next dorm, laughing nervously to calm myself down. Two hours, two interrogations by RAs and the fire department, and a $175 fine later, I went to bed.
March 24th, 2020
I’d barely cooked since that night, limiting myself to nervously making sausages and a cake or two at home for an entire year. But when I came to live in my friend’s apartment in Berkeley at the start of quarantine, I realized that I wouldn’t have a meal plan anymore. As tempting as living on sausages and cake might be, I’d have to learn how to cook for real.
In the sparsely stocked apartment kitchen, I started with a quick google search: “cooking tips for college kids”. One of the first hits, a cooking page ran by some white woman in her 50s, mentioned all the basics: making eggs, noodles, and chicken. It was a start, but going from a meal plan covering three (sometimes even four) meals a day to this simple list of three items seemed a little dumb to me. After a couple of days on this diet, I realized that I don’t have to cook like an actual college kid, because a) I have way more time and b) “college kid food” sucked.
After a consultation with my parents, I spent an entire morning raiding Trader Joe’s and Safeway, coming back with fat bags full of meat, vegetables, sauces, and dairy. From there, I started from the ground up with ‘real’ basics: fried rice, salad, pasta. In my experience, fried rice helped me learn to cook the fastest: the various ingredients all have to be prepared separately and in different ways. Through fried rice, I learned to cook rice, sauté vegetables, boil and fry meat, and make good sauces. Though my first couple of tries had overcooked meat, weak sauces, and soggy rice (nothing is harder to clean out of a pan than soggy rice, which was honestly my strongest initial motivation to improve), I was able to finally make a passable plate of fried rice.
Over the next couple of months, my roommates and I decided to rotate cooking dinner, and it was the pressure of cooking for other people that helped me to improve the most: finding recipes made by more white women online and even going through hours of Binging with Babbish videos became a part of my daily routine after classes. I kept buying more and more spices from Trader Joe’s, trying to incorporate them into the dinners and lunches I cooked.
It sounds really corny (and cocky) to say, but with more and more practice, my cooking became better and better, both in their complexity and taste. I graduated from scrambled eggs and fried rice to risotto and chicken tikka, and my friends and I only got better after moving in with some older girls from Stanford who already had the cooking thing down. They even had a whole cupboard just for spices and sauces, which we gladly took advantage of. Though I did have my fair share of terrible dishes (an Italian burrito, fried rice with 30 teaspoons of pepper, and pasta made with 5 expired ingredients), there were a few highlights over the last 6 months as well: Japanese tuna steaks, Hawaiian burgers, and my magnum opus: 8-cheese mac and cheese.
By the end of my sojourn in California, I felt confident in my ability to put up a decent plate of food, and confident that I had at least partially mastered one of the skills of adult life. The sound of a fire alarm, which used to make my pulse jump by at least 20 beats, felt like a distant memory. I even learned how to make fried chicken, and honestly? It tasted pretty good.
Quarantimes 