Learning about learning

I admit I haven’t driven in Crunk even once since we got back to the city, but I was making some nice progress for a while there. I’m starting to get the hang of the 3-point turn. Becoming more familiar with reverse. Actually using the handbrake. If only all the driving test involved was getting from Mum and Dad’s place to the swimming pool and back, I’d ace the thing. And with car ownership comes other random tidbits of basic knowledge that escapes the licence-less, like knowing how to fill up with petrol. I’d never used a petrol pump until a couple of months ago. Wild, eh?

My nerves in the kitchen are getting their exercise too – the further I go along with this, the more I think I have a proper phobia. When I think things are going badly, my heart sinks with titanic momentum. If the instructions don't make sense, I break into a dizzy, anxious sweat . It’s not just nerves about getting a meal right. I have some serious issues here. I thought that if I kept experimenting, kept trying, this would improve – and in a way, it has. I’m at ease with the meals I’ve practised a lot. I’m very good at chopping. Similarly with my scrapbooking epiphany, if I can’t see how the whole meal is going to pan out, this becomes a problem. I put my faith in recipe books and halfway through, realise these recipe books were not necessarily made for panicky kitchen-inept types such as myself. I need to be told exactly what to do. Cooking for dummies. I fall into traps where I interpret things wrong, and when I am right, I second guess myself. If somebody else is there, watching, this somehow drains any faith I had in myself at all. All this ‘learning’ makes me feel very childish sometimes, which is sort of the opposite effect of what I was hoping for.

It confuses me that I do not feel this way about baking. Flour, eggs, buttering cake tins… this is a different, friendlier and more familiar world. A lot is to be said for having spent so much of my childhood with a cheeky finger in the mixing bowl. I have a lot more instinct for it, and this more than anything makes the gulf between baking and cooking feel very wide and real. Because I like cooking. I’m just not very good at it. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that if you mess up a cake, you don’t get dessert, and that’s not really a big deal. Even a bad dessert is generally kinda good. But if you mess up dinner, then everyone goes hungry and is grumpy and hates you. That terrifies me.

Anyway, I’m a pro at schnitzel now. Roast vegetables make a good side, or mashed potato, and I can do both of those confidently. I’m getting the swing of chicken saltimbocca (although I can never ever remember what it is called). I can probably put risotto under my belt. I’m on my way to perfecting pasta bakes and sausage cassoulet, but they are a work in progress. Not unlike my maturity, perhaps. Look ma! I can feed myself and my husband! I’m almost a grown up!