Cooking School / 料理教室

We've been watching Food Network's Worst Cooks in America on Netflix, and I'm starting to think that I should take my lack of cooking skills more seriously. With all the cookbooks in my house, I must be able to find explanations of basic cooking skills—cutting, boiling, baking, braising.

But what is so appealing about Worst Cooks is the presence of Chefs Anne and Bobby (at least in the seasons we've been watching)—entertaining people who are also really great chefs. The show gives me hope that, even for someone like me, a teacher may actually do the trick of teaching me to cook properly.


(This of course is super unfair to my mum, who's been showing me how to cook since I was a kid. I mean, I think that's how a lot of people "learn to cook"—in their own kitchens as they grow up, with their parents (usually mothers) showing them how to put food on the table. But the problem with this method of teaching/learning is that, if you (like me) need more guidance than "then you cook the chicken until done and add the sauce", you come out at the end of the curriculum a super half-baked cook.)

So I thought: cooking class! I can just take a cooking class and have non-family members teach me how to do shit like cut and grill. Then at least they're obligated to give me precise measurements and time spans.

But then I thought: oh wait, I've done that before. Once. An experience that produced the very tasty (but also very brown-ish) meal pictured above. A fun experience, yes, but one that told me that I'm really not cut out for cooking classes.

I was living in Nagoya at the time, and there was a coupon magazine that had coupons and deals at a bunch of different places—restaurants, hair salons, etc. One of them was a one-coin (¥500) trial cooking class to see if you wanted to sign up for the multi-week class offered at the same school. The school was just a subway ride away from my apartment, so I went to check it out.

But you know, just because I step into a cooking school doesn't mean I stop doing the same stupid things I do in the kitchen every day. Not follow the recipe. Not measure the ingredients. Do things out of order. We had to cook in groups at the school, and the three other people in my group couldn't hide their horror at the way I cut the potatoes and fried up my rice.

So, maybe no cooking school for me. If I can't follow recipes even in the presence of a teacher, why bother with the lesson fee? I think the alternative might be to do the popular "cooking the book" thing. A Wall Street Journal article from 2008 talks about how people back then were starting to make popular the concept of cooking through entire cookbooks and blogging about them. If I choose the right book, maybe I can learn to be somewhat proficient—and feed myself in the process. I even have a cookbook that only has 14 recipes in it, which, I think, is a great place to start.