The Value of Cooking

My road to becoming a self sufficient cook has come by many stages. After leaving college and joining the Army, instead of a promised trip to Germany, I was sent to the back of the beyond at Fort Hood, Texas. There I was installed in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, which at the time offered a square, cinderblock room painted institutional green and furnished with a chair and bed, upon which were generations of cigarette burns reaching back to the Korean War. A common refrigerator in the hall was placed for the convenience of the BOQ rats, who stole everything desirable, someone else placed in it, such as beer. So I purchased a toaster oven in the exchange and stocked up on the cheap TV dinners available in the commissary at a cost of four for a dollar. Each of them consisted of a dollop of wall paper paste, three or four pathetic, dried kernels of frozen corn and something that was supposed to resemble either a piece of fried chicken or beef something or other.
As soon as I could, I made the acquaintance of some other single lieutenants in my battalion, and we rented a house. Those who cooked were exempt from doing the dishes, and so I learned to prepare my first delicacy: French fries. I made these by cutting up potatoes and throwing them into a pan of boiling vegetable oil, and served with some sort of fried or broiled meat, and, of course, beer.
Tours at Fort Hood for second lieutenants were mercifully brief, it being situated in the middle of the dry belt of Texas with no social life within a four hour drive. The buildings at the time were still WWII vintage yellow wooden structures which stretched out for miles. I was told Vietnam would be an improvement, and in some ways it was. At least the married guys couldn’t get any either.
Being in the infantry we subsisted on C-rations, various meals served in olive drab cans, with a fairly decent variety. One can consisted of the main meal such as “Ham and Eggs, chopped.” In the field cooking was accomplished with small bits of C-4, which we all carried. That’s right, the very C-4 which is still very much a part of the Al Qaeda basic supplies. It has the consistency of dried up marshmallows and is safe unless mashed into a combined space and ignited quickly. In the open it burns at a temperature about three times the surface of the sun. This was proven by one, who, after heating his coffee water, decided the right thing to do would be to douse the flame, and stepped on it. The result was that it melted a hole through the bottom of his boot. Since re-supplying the infantry with footgear was of rather low priority with the rear echelon folks, he stomped around the jungle with a hole the size of a fifty cent piece (ever seen one of them?) in the bottom of his boot.
My favorite recipe, taught to me by a self proclaimed Hill Billy from Kentucky was to take the can of beans and franks and the can of cheese, something akin to Cheez-whiz and melt the latter into the beans. The water crackers which accompanied the cheese were broken up into the mess, and as with all recipes, anointed with hot sauce. I still make it, only my wife makes us eat it off dishes, and not out of cans, the way it is supposed to be consumed.
Ham and Eggs, chopped, combat quiche, were generally eaten cold. That was a meal you either liked or detested. On one occasion, as a reservist, I was assigned to a regular army battalion at Ft. Knox. Trying to be a good guy, I volunteered to take them. The response was quick: “Get in line, bucko.” I happened to get into a unit of Ham &Eggs, chopped aficionados.
Stationed in Germany, I learned to make French onion soup from the French wife of a fellow unit member, and to cook chicken in beer from a civilian military intelligence officer. I kept all this knowledge, because I knew that a man, who can cook, is sexy…Even if he is a dork.
On our first date, I cooked my wife an eclectic mix of kilbasa soup, potato pancakes and shoo-fly pie. It was love at first bite. It certainly wasn’t my looks or money.
I have since learned that cookbooks are only guides and after a while you learn that you can mix things like ground chicken and nutmeg. And as my favorite painter, the late Bob Ross, used to say, “Let’s get crazy.”
Tonight my wife said she was going to cook pork chops in barbecue sauce. She said I didn’t sound excited. I replied her cooking was predictable.
Mine evokes fear. When my girls would come home from school and ask, “What are we having?” Heather, the oldest, would tiptoe into the kitchen and report back, “One of Dad’s creations.” They would look at each other with wide eyes and very uneasy faces.
Now, Heather eats sushi, that which commercial fishermen would refer to here in Maine as “bait,” or “gurry.” She recently offered me a piece, and said, “Try this, it tastes like the smell of Dick’s Lobster Wharf.
Yup, it did.