Cooking in Philly

I don't have to say how different it is living on your own v. living at home.

At home, your laundry magically gets done & you can come home to neatly pressed & ironed shirts and dresses.

At home, there's always food. And you don't even have to make it yourself!

While I'm such a food lover, and I try to experiment with different things to eat and cook at home, I have to say I'm not much of a natural cook.

I need recipes. Written out, looked at, right next to me as I cook.

I'm not at all someone who "eyeballs" ingredients. For the longest time, I didn't know what a "pinch" of salt meant. Literally a pinch? fyi, apparently it's about 1/8 a tsp.

In any case, if I am at all a successful cook, it's largely because I can follow the directions from a recipe. Even the things I make all the time, I still look at recipes.

I didn't commit recipes to memory because, well, I didn't have to.

I guess Plato was onto something when he said that writing:

will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding. (Phaedrus 27a)

But when I first came here to Philly, I didn't have any recipes with me. Not a single cookbook. Yeah, sure I could look online at epicurious, foodnetwork, recipe bazaar, goop, etc., but for a while there, I didn't even have internet.

And I certainly wasn't going to eat out if I could help it.

So then, I had to gather my wits about me to figure out what I would eat everyday. My cooking became a tribute to my youth. Before I got my first cookbook, before I could log onto the internet to find recipes, I had what I learned how to make when I was younger through observation and assistance to the adults in my household, and the things I learned how my make myself through hard earned trial and error.

Chicken and rice dishes, roasted vegetables, omelettes, sauteed spinach, palmiers, baked fish, oven-baked granola, grilled (chicken) sausage...

and then, there was pasta.

Steamed clams with white wine, parsley, lemon with angelhair. Spaghetti and chicken sausage with marinara. And my favorite, portobello mushroom ravioli with brown-butter-balsalmic sauce with fresh parmesan.

In short, it was pure gluttony.

And it was lovely and beautiful. Sure, I could make way more complicated stuff--I have since received my recipe collection--but I love this idea of everything coming to me as I walk the aisles of the fresh produce section, as I approach the deli counter, or the seafood station. I love seeing what's fresh and what's good, what's in season and discovering what I can do with it as I taste seasoning and adjust as needed.

Without my recipes.