We stood there, at an impasse, staring across the yellowing linoleum chasm, neither party willing to back down.  Like a pair of western gunslingers, pistols slung low on the hip, hands flexing with fingers spread and eyes concentrating on the smallest of twitches in anticipation of the one movement that foreshadowed an explosion of motion and sound.  Time passed, breathing slowed, and sweat rolled slowly down the scalp, sliding below the shirt collar and turning clothing to cling wrap.  

The illusion was shattered when a voice behind me asked, “What are you doing?”  Refusing to take my eyes off my opponent for even a fraction of a second, I tilted my chin half an inch skyward. I caught peripheral movement to my right, followed by a head and shoulders, then J was standing between us seemingly unmindful of the danger he’d placed himself in.  “That roast isn’t going to fit in that crockpot.”

“Duh,” I wanted to tell him, as I’d managed to figure that astute observation out on my own.  It was the next question that stumped me. 

“What are you going to do with it?”

Ah, THE question, and the entire reason for the OK Corral showdown in my apartment kitchen.  I shrugged.  “I have no freakin’ clue.” 

Four and a half pounds of bone in chuck roast. It had seemed like a great buy at the time.  Clearance sale no less and I had a tried and true recipe to use.  Until I unwrapped the half cow and placed it next to the crockpot in question.  A 1980’s burnt orange ceramic with a metal, egg-white colored shell, one piece pot with three settings, hi, low and off.   Yep, a true antique or dinosaur, however once wants to classify it, and about 4 inches in diameter too small.

It was the ‘silly woman’ laugh that started a mental meltdown, frustration surfacing, teeth clenching and a tighter grip on my Pampered Chef tongs.  They might only be hard plastic but I was pretty confident I could do some serious damage if I went ninja on ‘Chuck’.  J grabbed the tongs and gently steered me away from the dead livestock, pushing me towards the dining room table.

“Relax, and go play with your cookies.” 

I grabbed the mixing bowl of icing like a drowning sailor discovering a lifeline and plunked myself down at the table, refusing to look back. “What are you going to do?”  I stared at the dozens of unfrosted cookies and felt the tension easing from my shoulders.

“Don’t worry about it, I got it covered.” 

I didn’t worry.  More from the fact that I’d reached a point I no longer cared about cooking and was entering a Zen moment creating ‘real’ food. Bakers can do that.

Soon I was covered with a fine dusting of powdered sugar, food color tinting my fingertips and I’d lost track of all the answers I’d given J.  I was in that zone of contentment where all was right with the world and starting to smell something delicious masking the smell of liquid sugar pouring from the pastry bag.

Plonk. I stared in fascination at the bowl of salad next to my elbow.  It was colorful, leafy with crumbled cheese and apple slices.  “Where’d that come from?”

J laughed. “Your refrigerator.” 

“How come I never saw it in there?”  He’d have easily convinced me he’d gone to the store when I wasn’t looking.

“You mix it together.”

“No I don’t.”

“Well you can now, and here’s your dinner.” 

I didn’t recognize Chuck, or at least the 4 inch strip broiled in barbeque he’d been transformed into.  I poked at it experimentally, then licked my finger.  “Mmm, that’s good,” I looked behind me.  “Where’s the rest of it?”

J pointed to the crockpot.  “Dinner for tomorrow.”

J left while I sat in stunned silence contemplating the black magic involved in this thing called cooking.  All I saw in the vegetable bin was vegetables, and somehow he’d taken those individual items and composed not one, but two scrumptious meals, including Chuck. 

I’m lacking that gift of sight at the moment, but throw me a bag of flour, sugar, butter and eggs and we’ll both have fun in the sandbox!

And I’ve learned my lesson, next time; I’m leaving Chuck in the store and opting for that petite cut.

I am a Baker, and having talked to numerous other Bakers and even a few Cooks, I’ve come to the conclusion there is a completely different mindset when it comes to cooking. For me it’s similar to shoving a page of calculus derivative problems at a grade school student who has just learned what an x and y graph looks like. It’s relatively easy to number the two bold lines intersecting at (0,0) and then plot a series of paired integers with dots.  The difficulty arises when those single digit numbers inside the parenthesis are switched out for mathematical equations represented by letters and unintelligible symbols.  Bring on the Tylenol. 

Like any good argument there are two sides to every story. On the one side, Cooks are the first to offer they don’t need a recipe and tend to throw ingredients together by taste, claiming Bakers must adhere to a recipe like NASA computers plotting Space Shuttle reentry calculations, exact to the micrograms.  

It’s my theory (in a Utopian world) that bakers should be able to cook and cooks should be able to bake.  After all, we are only combining ingredients, adding heat and waiting an amount of time, and yet somehow there exists an unfathomably deep canyon between the two.    

Bakers (and Cooks) use recipes as a set of directions, knowing like any well plotted roadmap that if you take I-90 from Seattle you will eventually wind up in Boston, every time.  And it won’t rely on how fast you drive, how many rest stops or side jaunts you take, the result is always the same.  Leave Seattle, end of the road is Boston. Any desired outcome requires some specific guidelines, but that doesn’t mean a Baker won’t play around a bit with ingredients. A pinch of spice here, a swap of ingredient there and we’ve now invented a new cookie.  

So why doesn’t this cooking thing make sense?  Take the latest episode in my quest to teach myself to cook.  I found a recipe for parmesan chicken.  I read through it a couple of times, make sure I have close to the ingredients on hand, because cooking claims you don’t have to be precise, correct?

Step one, pull the chicken breasts from the freezer and thaw 4 pieces.  After the chicken is thawed I realize I hadn’t noticed that 4 pieces refers to 4 pieces after you cut the breasts in half. Okay, there is extra chicken and we set it aside figuring we’ll find a use for it shortly.  Turn the oven on – check.  Heat oil in pan on the stove top and drop in bread crumbs with garlic, salt and pepper then set aside in a bowl.  Look back at recipe which calls for tomato puree, but I have tomato sauce and they’re close, right?  Throw that into pan and bring to boil with some water and a few more spices and let it reduce.  About 10 minutes later (read a chapter or two while waiting) the instructions say to drop the chicken into the sauce. Yep, it’s bubbling away nicely and about ready to put in the oven when I realize there is still a bowl of breadcrumbs off to the side of the stove.  In a panic I reach for the magazine and read down the directions.  I’ve not missed a step according to the printed word, but apparently I was expected to be a mind reader and should have breaded the chicken before dumping it into the sauce. 

Yep, I’m looking at a pan of chicken and sauce, happily bubbling away on my stove.  Being the baker and optimist I am, I took that bowl of bread crumbly goodness and dumped it into the sauce.  Call me bold.  I did stir the crumbly bits around in an attempt to fuse the ingredients before placing the entire mess into the oven.  I allowed it to cook for the appropriate amount of time before extracting the pan and adding the parmesan cheese to the top and then let it sit a few more minutes inside to brown the cheese.  

The final product?  It was cooked, and one could probably describe it as more of a soupy muddled parmesan chicken dish.  Awkward but tasty, and lesson learned.  

Cooking requires more thought than baking as it’s a completely different set of rules.