Free Julia Child Rules by Karen Karbo Page B

it comes to eyeballing how big a bowl or pan one might need for any given mixture; if a dish like, say, the
croquetas
, requires something to be mixed, then browned, there will always be at least two extra too-small bowls and pans per cooking step. *
    The tapas feast was memorable because it was delicious, and also because it took me four hours to clean the kitchen, including using a butter knife to scrape the flour/water paste † off the counters, stove top, table top, refrigerator handle, and yes, ceiling. The kitchen was over a hundred degrees and I was sweating like … a person cleaning the kitchen in the middle of summer, when turning on the oven makes as much sense as turning on the furnace.
    And yet, we hear nothing about this from all these passionate cooks, home and professional alike. Do they all have a personal dishwasher? Who scrapes and scrubs and loads and unloads the machine and swabs down the counters and the floors and scrapes the flour/water paste off every blessed surface with a butter knife? Because that takes me at least as long as it does to cook something.
    Never mind the three minutes it takes to eat it.
    Even Julia once said, “I do love to cook. I suppose it would lose some of its glamour if I were married to a ditch digger and had seven children, however so.” Meaning, of course, if you had to cook for that many people day in day out, there would be so many dishes to do you would lose the will to live, much less cook.
    Julia tossed off seven as the number of children it would take to dampen the glamour of cooking, but in my experience it takes only three, plus one father-in-law. Yes, I have done my time as a galley slave. For a half decade I was married to a guy with kids, and our blended family was comprised of my four-year-old, his five- and eleven-year-old, and his father, who lived with us for a year while doing some contract work for the phone company in Portland. In their defense, my husband and my father-in-law ate whatever I put in front of them. Indeed, they ate
a lot
of whatever I put in front of them. A dozen enchiladas would be hoovered up before I’d returned to the table with the napkins. Seconds, and thirds, were the rule of the day with spaghetti, mac ’n cheese, anything that could be self-served with an overflowing ladle. Another woman might have felt gratified; instead, since I was also the alpha breadwinner at the time, I marveled at how fast thirty bucks worth of organic free-range chicken breasts could disappear.
    Every night I tried to make something that everyone could tolerate, since we’d laid down the law that what was for dinner was what was for dinner. The kids could choose not to eat it, but that was all there was to eat. I would spend hours creatingmenus that took into account one kid’s hatred of red meat and fruit, another’s hatred of fish and pasta (except plain, with salt and butter), and another’s hatred of chicken and all vegetables. I felt like I was training for the World Rubik’s Cube Championships, and no one was ever satisfied.
    The kids learned to circumvent our strict law against saying “Yuck” when faced with what was for dinner by developing their inner food critics. Not a minute after they’d each taken a bite or two, one would say, “I don’t really care for this steamed broccoli, it’s a little rubbery.” Or, “Pork chops aren’t really my cup of tea, but if they were, I’d say these were a little tough.” Or, “If I was a veggie burger person, which I’m not, I’d say this one could use a little seasoning.”
    I’ve come a little far afield here. My point is this: If your relationship to food and cooking is largely positive and uncomplicated; if, unlike me, you harbor no tortured ambivalence in relation to cooking, then every day provides at least several wonderful opportunities to follow a whim. It’s a little thing, opting to make beef pho when you thought you were headed in the direction of a nice lasagna, but it keeps