Old Dogs and New Tricks

When I grew up, there was a big push to educate yourself before you were old enough to live outside of the home. This created the misconception for some that after you were on your own, you knew what you knew and lost the opportunity to learn more. Though I did well in school, there were still several things that I didn’t know how to do. One of those things was how to cook a real meal.
You see, I grew up in a household with a vegetarian and a younger child that wouldn’t eat certain foods. So, the dishes that won the hearts of the children in the house were cheese sandwiches, cheese pizza, cheese roll-ups, and butter noodles. Then, when we did make a bigger meal, at least during the week, it was usually hamburger helper. This left me with few cooking skills, because when I made food for my siblings, there wasn’t much of a selection of things that I could make.
Eventually, I ended up living on my own, and I expanded the items on my menu to chicken that I would fry in oil and anything that I could buy in a packet and add water or milk too. Even when I made dinner for my friends or women that I was dating, I usually cooked the same meal, give or take switching up the packaged pasta. To say the least, I didn’t really cook that much. I relied heavily on drive-thrus or food that I could buy from my work, and I didn’t have a good diet or the knowledge to know how to cook at home to save money.
When my wife and I first got together, I showed her my special chicken dish, and she really liked the chicken. However, after a while, I found out that she knew how to make several dishes that I didn’t and was used to eating a completely different diet than I was. She would make casseroles and tacos. She would even fancy up a couple of burgers and make pasta dishes that I had never made in my entire life. I never had to worry about food, because I knew that she would cook it, but when I began my journey as a stay at home mom and writer, that changed.
My wife was working a horrendous amount of hours at that time, and it just didn’t seem fair to have her working all of those hours to come home and have to cook her own dinner. My grandma always had dinner on the table for my grandpa. She was an excellent cook, and I knew that none of her children had to worry about eating when they were younger, so I sought out to do the same for my family. I wanted to learn to cook so I could feed my wife and children. I just needed to figure out how I was going to do that.
That’s when it dawned on me. I remembered watching a food channel a few years back with a woman that I had been dating at the time, and I thought that if I could just watch that channel, I might learn a thing or two about how to make a meal. I started to do this, bound and determined to learn new skills that would help me around the house. I even found a couple of shows that my spouse and I could watch together.
It worked. I ended up getting a ton of information from watching these shows, and I even began asking my grandma for recipes and looking up new dishes online. I would experiment with new dishes that I liked such as chicken and cheese jalapeno corn chowder and bacon fried potatoes and cheese. My wife loved the new array of food choices, and she usually had something to put in her belly after she got off of her long shifts at work.
Throughout the years, my cooking has gotten better, and I have taken a real interest in learning how to make dishes that we have enjoyed in restaurants and so on. I even make a lot of the food that we take with us when we go to grill outs or have people over for the holidays. However, without the knowledge that I could still learn this new skill, I wouldn’t be able to do what I can now. So, I am thankful that I was able to push forward in learning this new skill and for the inspiration that I got from my wife and my grandma.