I made Ratatouille tonight! More specifically, Ratatouille Provençal, straight out of my copy of the Joy of Cooking. I’ve been meaning to find something new to cook as an alternative to the chili, with the requirement of it being hearty, made from healthy stuff, easy, and good for lunch-packing. Ratatouille seems to fit all of those categories, and after perusing many, many recipes online today, I decided that the Joy of Cooking one seemed to be the most simple. It seemed like as good a place to start as any.

Ratatouille recipes vary pretty widely; my mom remembers my grandmother making it with tomatoes, zucchini, and onions, and recipes seem to be undecided on whether eggplant is required, as well as the merits of yellow vs. green squash/zucchini. (I am so embarrassed to admit this, but I didn’t realize until the sign in the produce aisle told me that yes, they are the same damn thing. Way to go, college graduate! Know your produce!) I made it with eggplant, zucchini, two red bell peppers, an onion, garlic, a can of diced tomatoes (while using fresh tomatoes would be preferable to this giant tomato fan, when the recipe calls for them to peeled, I am not above being REALISTIC about my cutting skillz. Really.) and some seasoning. It was very easy and totally straightforward (except for the part where you cook the eggplant and zucchini first, then save them in a bowl to be added in at the end; other recipes seem to just switch up the cooking order and leave it at that). Of course, I didn’t end up eating until after 9pm after a slow supermarket trip, even slower chopping, and a surprise visit from my siblings.

My verdict? While maybe I didn’t love it, I really, really liked it. I will definitely make this again, and feel totally confident in modifying this recipe for next time: one bell pepper, way more zucchini and either no eggplant (the jury is still out on eggplant. Do I like it? …maybe? Can I tolerate it? Sure. Would I choose to eat it? …uhh….) or a way smaller amount of eggplant. And one of these days, maybe I’ll learn to be more adventurous with seasoning. One (baby) step at a time. (PS. I would post the recipe here, but I am a bit unclear, still, about whether that’s really allowed, copyright-wise. Or maybe it’s just the holy book status of the Joy of Cooking that gives me pause. Ah well.)

But it’s the first omelet I’ve ever made, so I am pretty damn pleased with myself. I’ve watched my mom make many omelets, but other than a failed attempt to “help” (aka “watch”) a former boyfriend make one of those weird fluffy omelets, I’ve never made one myself. Whenever I start my usual whining about cooking, people always talk about how they ate lots of eggs when they lived alone in their first apartments. Why don’t I ever make eggs? I don’t quite know.

But anyway, mixed in with my pile of mail at my parents’ house this weekend was an article about how to make the perfect omelet (complete with step-by-step pictures for dummies like me) that my mom ripped out of the May issue of Good Housekeeping. I had to buy a dozen eggs when I made cookies over the weekend, so all signs pointed to me making an omelet.

There isn’t much to say about the process other than the fact that it didn’t go as smoothly as the instructions made it sound. For that reason, I was a bit shocked when I tasted my not-so-pretty spinach, feta, and tomato omelet and found out that it was quite tasty indeed. I don’t know why I’m always so surprised when things I make turn out well. An omelet is not exactly rocket science. However, it was healthy, easy, quick, not carbohydrate-based, and made out of fresh ingredients! Imagine that.

I have been talking a big game lately about how I want to cook more, rather than continue to be, well, afraid of it. In fact, my friends over at IPB Living very kindly sent me their chili recipe over a month ago and it has been lingering in my inbox the entire time. On Friday afternoon, I realized that my parents would be away all weekend visiting my brother up at school, and with that realization, my plans to go over to their house and have them lovingly provide me with something to eat went out the window.

So after work on Friday, I stopped at the grocery store and actually bought all of the ingredients for the chili. I was too lazy to make it on Friday night (plus, there was a baseball game on) so I decided to save it for Saturday. It actually worked out very well… after I spent a large portion of the morning waiting for the cable guy and then waiting for him to fix my damn internet (which had been down since Tuesday night AGAIN), I went out for a late lunch with Becky and Becky’s mom and one of Becky’s friends from college to the apparently famous Circus drive-in in Wall. It was there that I ate a monstrous burger, fries, onion rings, pink lemonade, and a strange ice cream sundae that had caramel and some sort of weird cookie shell around vanilla ice cream. Basically, that all meant that I was not hungry for dinner, at all.

Instead, I decided, what the hell, let’s just make the chili. I calculated half of the recipe (because the IPB original calls for a “very large pot” which I am not sure I have, as well as three pounds of meat and about a million vegetables) and donned my fancy little apron and got down to work.

At first, I was being admittedly paranoid about chopping the vegetables. What, exactly, does minced mean? Is that chopping it into something REALLY small, or just MOSTLY small? I’m attempting that Food network knife trick where you keep the tip on the cutting board and cut big piles of stuff all at once, and bits of onions are literally flying all over the kitchen, onto my shoes, into my little bowl of soda can tabs, it was just silly. Something about the onion flying everywhere just made me relax… because does it really matter how finely chopped these vegetables are? Not really. It’s not like there’s a test at the end, or I have to present the finished product in front of a panel of judges.

It was all surprisingly easy, from letting the vegetables soften to adding the chili powder (almost forgot to halve that quantity though!) to letting the ground turkey cook. Again, I am not sure what I was so afraid of. Another light bulb that went off for me was that I can change this recipe if I want. If I personally would like more peppers in my chili, I can just ADD MORE. !!! I know, it was shocking to me as well. But in all seriousness, I think this is something I could handle. Maybe if I start with basic things, like chili and soups and stews, I can just sort of.. figure things out as I go. (I know all of this sounds frighteningly obvious, but to me, someone who has never really learned to cook, these are all things I have to learn for myself as I go. And you know what, it’s not as bad as I thought. It’s not like I’m going to mess up the chili if I cut too many onions.)

The one last mishap was that I was so excited that I could add a beer to the chili that I forgot that I was reading off of the original, non-halved recipe, and ungracefully dumped the whole beer into the chili, rather than half of the beer. I freaked out for about a minute, and then I realized that I could let it simmer for a little longer and things would work themselves out.

Although the whole process took way longer than it may have needed to, I was much more relaxed about it because I wasn’t hungry. The fact that I wasn’t planning to eat it after I finished cooking it allowed me to just chill out. Once it was done simmering, that all changed, because my one taste to make sure it was okay turned into quite a few more.

Surprise: the chili turned out really, really well. I was perhaps a bit too cautious with the chili peppers (I went with jalapenos because I know nothing about chili peppers and I was scared of the spiciness) and the chili powder (I was so afraid of making to so spicy that I wouldn’t be able to eat it), but you know what? Now I know. I have enough leftovers to feed me for at least a week, and that is nothing short of awesome. I am so excited that I cooked something that is actually healthy AND tasty AND easy that I might just do this again sometime. (Or every week, forever.)

I haven’t made it a secret here that I really don’t know how to cook. I’ve written about it here a few times, in an effort to both make fun of myself and to chronicle my efforts at learning how to cook… kicking and screaming the whole way. The truth is, I still don’t feel at all like I know what I’m doing, and when I’m by myself, trying to decide what to eat for dinner most nights is a chore. Hence my rather pasta-centric diet. Pasta is easy and I like carbs and I don’t have to think about it.

In reality, I am sure that I possess whatever mysterious skills one needs to cook food that is not comprised of noodles. I have done it before, and two weeks ago, I made homemade macaroni and cheese and fed it to my coworkers, with great success. So I’m beginning to feel a bit more confident, asking people to give me recipes, trying to decide what I should try next. I have slowly been accumulating chili recipes, and one of my coworkers very kindly gave me her chili recipe and I think I can handle it. (I’ll write about it here once I get the nerve to actually DO it, naturally.)

So this past weekend was Easter at my parents’ house. I kept asking my mom what I could bring, but in reality I already knew what I wanted to make: these Mexican chocolate icebox cookies someone brought into work. Super dark chocolate cookies with a kick of chili that somehow made them even more chocolatey. And I don’t usually like chocolate, so I surprised even myself by wanting so very badly to make them. I convinced my mom that if I also made a batch of chocolate chip cookies, the Mexican chocolate cookies would work too, even though my family would probably be a bit wary of something weird like chocolate cookies with chili powder in them.

And so Friday night, I’m here with my brand new, unused red apron, trying to make sense of a borrowed hand mixer, wondering if I could pull this off. Well, of course I could. I had to freeze the dough overnight, though, so I couldn’t find out how they turned out until Saturday. I ended up at my parents’ house on Saturday (home of an actually trustworthy oven, unlike the POS I have in my apartment). I baked the chocolate cookies and then made and baked the chocolate chip cookies. I feel a bit silly admitting this, but somewhere in all of my “I can’t cook” falderal, I forgot that I LOVE to bake. Baking is perfect – you measure precisely, you follow the recipe, it’s a formula. It’s satisfying in the same way that math problems or color-coded Excel spreadsheets are. So yes, my cookies were a huge hit, both at Easter and with the poker crowd Saturday night. (Although the Easter folks were in fact a bit scared of the Mexican chocolate cookies, but at the same time, I blinked and the chocolate chip ones were gone.) I’m super glad that I figured out that duh, baking is fun, and I can bake, and well, even.

I also think I may have gotten to the bottom of why I’m so afraid of cooking. Something about the idea of thinking up what might go well together and how much of this or that to use and hey what about that herb or spice, wouldn’t that complement this perfectly? just freaks me out. I don’t KNOW that stuff. I hardly even know what aisle in the grocery store to look for most stuff. But wait for it – the dumbass realization – hey, maybe I should just, oh I don’t know, use freaking RECIPES until I get the hang of things. Imagine that.