Thursday, October 04, 2012

Learning to Cook

With the Kitchen Queen Contest coming up, we here at Infomaniac would like to know...


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How, when and where did YOU learn how to cook?


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34 comments:

  1. With my mum, in my kitchen, making chocolate cake. I think I was 8.

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    1. Jeez! Exactly the same thing for me. Mom. Kitchen. Chocolate cake. 8 years old...

      Well... I did already knew how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich but that doesn't count as cooking, eh?

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    2. Perhaps you and Damien were separated at birth...or after age 8, in this case.

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  2. We were taught Home Economics at school, teaching precious life skills, starting at 10 years of age until leaving. We were taught all the different ways of making scones from cheese to gridle, how to use a sewing machine etc. I remember making an apple pie and sabotaging the other ovens by turning them on full blast so they all came out crispy burnt and mine was perfect.

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    1. BITCHES beware!

      Read Mitzi's last sentence and don't say she didn't warn you!

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    2. My recipe doesn't require the use of the oven! HA!

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    3. She could still short-circuit your griddle pan when you're not looking!

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    4. I plan to shoot Mitzi with a tranquilizer dart gun before I peel the first potato. Bitch isn't going to get the drop on me.

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    5. PEENEE: That might be Mitzi dealt with but you’re still up against the wrath of Cookie!

      The Bitch has claws!

      Jungle red!

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  3. Muther, at some point early in my childhood, gave me a Betty Crotch cook book plus watching that old queen, Graham Kerr on the Galloping Gourmet

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  4. i too hung on every word that graham kerr uttered, but
    with my mum being "the barefoot cuntessa," my
    future was predestined.

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  5. I too am a graduate of the 'Graham Kerr Drinking Team and Cookery School'!!

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  6. TOPHER, NORMA & NATIONS: Does this mean that you Bitches run into the kitchen, leaping over anything in your way, and drink wine liberally whilst cooking?

    By the way, Graham Kerr now lives in Washington State!...so you can visit both Kerr AND Nations when you take home the Kitchen Queen Contest Crown.

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  7. I remember milking the house cow, putting the milk through the separator and then churning the cream to butter to put on fresh scones when i was about 4 years of age. that was after making a batch of fairy cakes with my Nana.

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    1. Prinny, could you clarify (NOT the butter, a la Graham Kerr) ... could you clarify what you mean by HOUSE cow as opposed to barn cow?

      We had CATS in the house and COWS in the barn. But of course you Aussies have everything backwards.

      Fairy cakes... *titters*

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    2. "Queenie"... a big old black and white fresian was the Milking cow kept in the small paddock closest to the house rather than in the big paddocks with the rest of the small herd which were raised for slaughter. Hence the term "House Cow"
      She had her own private milking shed near the house that had two separate bays to secure her as she was milked and on the odd occasion a penchant for kicking over the bucket of warm fresh milk just before it was full! She could really be a Cow sometimes

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    3. PRINNY: Well thank goodness THAT’S cleared up.

      I had images of her curled up on the sofa with you watching Green Acres!

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  8. HOW can Ken love her "Famous Casserole" is this is Barbie Learns to Cook? I mean, if the casserole is *famous* and she can't cook, maybe it's really infamous and Ken is being a good sport by eating it. No one else will, but Ken will because his reward is a serving of Barbie's Bearded Clam.

    Somewhere in this of stuff I call my office I have a list of like two hundred Barbie's that they never have made, but should.

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    1. COOKIE: Barbie's gentile area was moulded smooth plastic so I doubt that Bearded Clam was on the menu.

      FIND the list and post it, Bitch!

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  9. I never did learn how. I gave up trying when at one of my earliest attempts my guests were howling at the table and bouncing my buns of the floor. I'm not kidding.

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    1. RILEY: Follow the bouncing buns!

      p.s. You missed your birthday celebration here on Infomaniac.

      No cake for YOU!

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  10. How, when and where.

    Basical training by mother, grandmother and grandfather (maternal side, both).

    Sometimes from the very late sixties to the mid-seventies of last century.

    In the very end of Franconia, literaly at the end of the known world (go in the woods and try not to step on a mine swept away by the last rain from the (inner German) border).

    From 20 onwards I had to cook for meself. So I learned things like rice (no such thing in the woods) and that there must be other possibilities to make a sauce, without using tons of Sahne (cream?); especially when you have no money to buy Sahne.
    For years I made my signature thing - Pamps. Today I still can do Pamps, but only when drunk beyond recognition. But I learned to cook with two pots maximum, still today I always calculate how to use what pot when and clean them "in between".
    I think I started to cook, enjoy eating and tastes some fifteen years ago - don't nail me on this. Don't know why, things happen. Today I can cook for other people, not all and everything, and not to all tastes: For most people it will be too hot, or too spicy - or much too lenient: It's easy to kill food with garlic, pepper, ach you name it; it's an art to find an equilibrium.
    And if I put some thinking in what I do and find an eater using the salt box first, "to ad some taste", I would like to throw the bastard out. But I am well educated, suave and nice, and will have an extra sip of wine, and a name scratched from the guestlist.
    Basically I am a Handwerker, craftsman; I recognize good workmanship, I recognize art, and I am confident enough to call something crap. I am limited, but good enough to get by. It's not muddeling through, I know what to do: flat share, student hall, ramshackle canteen, I lived there, I worked there, I ate there, I cooked there. I could handle an Imbiss and feed not only Currywurst to people, but the Pamps is always lurking ...

    Basically I learned nothing. It happens and I am curious. Only in the last years I started to understand a bit. Sometimes I allow meself to dream about the kitchen I would like to have.

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    1. Note to Mr. LAX if you are reading this…

      Do NOT add salt to Mago’s “pamps” before eating it.

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  11. Dropped on the floor in front of the kitchen sink; been there ever since....

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  12. Kabuki followed classic Julia Child on PBS. Self taught via The Joy Of Cooking cookbook. Kabuki can cook the devil out of simple American fare. The women folk in kabuki's family are notoriously bad cooks. For four generations. It must be a curse. Thanks goodness for kabuki's penis.

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    1. Thanks goodness for kabuki's penis.

      I bet you’ve heard that a LOT.

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  13. Once again, I feel so very out of it. When I left my childhood home, the only thing I could "cook" was Kraft Mac and Cheese. Sad. Also, my college roommate had to show me how to run a washing machine.

    I taught myself to cook and am quite proud of having done so.

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    1. PEENEE: But you can finger a tuba like nobody’s business!

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  14. I learnt with fourteen schoolboys in a home economics lesson. Best I don't recreate what I learnt though.
    Sx

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    1. Let me guess, Miss Scarlet...

      Beef bayonet and a tossed salad with plenty of salad cream?

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    2. Indeed! And very tasty :-)
      Sx

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  15. I'm afraid I bare the weight of child prodigies...
    And all this eating hasn't made me slim down either!

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