What's Cooking with Toby

    I have never shied away from the fact that I consider myself a creative person.  While the majority of the creativity pours into writing, I do have other ways of expressing myself.  I make art.  I film videos, frequently of my making art.  I decorate. One thing that I don't always mention here is that I cook.  It's just about the only household chore I was allowed to do growing up.  I was more interested about helping around the house when I was very young, but my mother always felt I was too little to do much.  By the time she felt I was big and old enough to help out more, I had just about lost all interest by not being involved sooner.  The lone exception was cooking, which has the potential to be one of the most dangerous of chores.  The reason I got involved in cooking is actually a big secret.  See, my mother can't cook.  Seriously.  She has all of these foibles about eating that has left her with a very bland palette and a strange idea about how food should be cooked.  Her cooking style compounded my own special need.  I have a fairly delicate sense of taste.  While it is not always infallible, I can sometimes detect subtle nuances of flavor that others cannot sense.  In particular, I could tell when I was eating leftovers, even when I didn't know I was doing it.  When I finally caught my mother fixing leftovers one day, I finally understood why I didn't like certain meals sometimes, when I had no problems at other times.  This could even extend to just reheating takeout for a few minutes after getting it home.  Not as often and mostly with meat, but it has happened.  From that day on, I haven't eaten leftovers.  To insure of this, I starting getting more involved in the cooking process.  See, if I was doing the cooking, I could tell whether or not leftovers were involved.  On the one hand, it meant that I could make things that I liked in the way I liked them.  On the other hand, it meant that my mother would wind up eating more leftovers than she would have liked, but I have always tried to compensate by fixing smaller portion sizes.  However, my mother always seems to find a way to have leftovers, even when she barely has a single portion size left.  Yuck.  This has led my to come up with many recipes over the decades.  Many are just jazzing up kits and boxes rather than cooking from scratch.  I do have a few favorites though, with a quick and easy meat sauce based on a Bolognese.  I am having it tonight, in fact, over some rotini with some garlic bread.  I'm also planning a new take on chicken tomorrow for Thanksgiving.  I don't like turkey.  I also don't go too overboard for the holiday either, as both of my maternal grandparents died around this time of year and my mother doesn't like the associations this brings.  I know it is kind of foolhardy into planning something entirely new on such short notice, but I have a feeling I can handle it.  I've done similar takes before.  I just have to plan a little bit extra this year.  I mean, cooking is not rocket science.  It's chemistry.  And an art.