WHAT KIND OF COOK ARE YOU A RELIANT SOLDIER OR CONFIDENT COMMANDER?

Byline: Steven Pratt Chicago Tribune 

Consider the following hypothetical situation:

By the time you get home from work, the rest of the family has pillaged the kitchen for snacks. The refrigerator offers the remains of a pot roast, a couple of zucchini, celery, some carrots, a green pepper and three oranges. The pantry has a couple of cans of beans, some canned tomatoes, pasta, rice, potatoes, onions and garlic plus a normal array of condiments and spices.

Do you:

1. Tell the kids to wash their hands and get in the car to go out to a restaurant?

2. Call for pizza delivery or zap some frozen microwave dinners?

3. Search out a recipe that conforms to ingredients you have on hand, then head to the store for whatever's missing?

4. Come up with something tasty and nourishing using what's on hand?

Americans take a variety of approaches to cooking. There are no right or wrong answers to this quiz. But there is always room for improvement.

Those who are wary of anything that requires peeling, slicing or heating might pick the first alternative and go to a restaurant. More Americans are finding that dinner away from home provides less hassle, though sometimes more heartburn and calories.

If you're a kitchen klutz or too weary to worry about quality or nutrition, you may choose solution No. 2: Heat and serve. Food manufacturers tell us every day that we don't have time to cook, that we need convenience products to survive.

But those who appreciate the flavor, healthfulness and economy of making their own meals probably will opt for one of the last two choices.

Those lacking in kitchen confidence might want to put their trust in a cookbook writer or an old family recipe.

But experienced home cooks, or those undaunted by the prospect of venturing beyond charted instructions, will pick No. 4.

Using just the few ingredients mentioned above, for instance, a creative cook might concoct a rich bean soup with corn bread muffins, a spaghetti dinner, a Creole-style stew with rice, an orange beef stir-fry, chili con carne or a casserole, depending on how she or he combined, spiced and cooked them.

Unfortunately, in today's world, the number of people able or willing to do that is shrinking, even though cooking creatively is cheaper than the other options.

When it comes to ordinary culinary knowledge and skill, America has "dumbed down," charges Nach Waxman, owner of Kitchen Arts and Letters, a New York City bookstore that focuses on culinary pursuits.

"We are dumb to the ingredients and procedures of the kitchen," he says. Even those who attempt to cook for themselves are "working almost totally by rote, a generation that is recipe dependent and crippled because of it."

It's not purely a 20th-century phenomenon, he says. "In the early colonial period, kitchens were sort of communal affairs, with cooks and people from the household and daughters who learned from each other.

"After that, children learned from their parents," but that doesn't happen as much anymore, he says. People don't understand the food they are eating, so it is not as good as it should be, Waxman says. Assuming one is interested in preparing his own food and can read, it isn't difficult. Thousands of cookbooks describe what to buy and how to assemble it, often in generous detail.

But how does one go from being a know-nothing, recipe-reliant soldier to being confident commander of a battery of pots and pans, refrigerators, blenders and stoves?

"It's not as hard as people make it out to be," says cooking doyenne Barbara Kafka, author of "Roasting, Simple Art."

"People have been cooking for eons. It's not rocket science; it's culture. Sometimes they learn from their forebears or through a set of recipes handed down. But even those whose parents didn't cook can learn. People just have to get brave enough to try."

"Sure, you can learn from books, computers and television," says Lisa Ekus, who manages publicity for dozens of cookbook writers, "but unless you go into the kitchen for some 'hands-on,' you aren't going to get it. You need to experience the pitfalls.

"People are buying cookbooks and reading new recipes, but as far as cooking, they tend to stick with old favorites."

Old or new, recipes still go only so far.

"We've become great followers of instructions," Waxman says. "Today's cooking is like painting by numbers. We've become dead heads and dead palates.

"There's no explanation of why we add something at a particular time or stir in different directions. We're just told, 'Heat for 3 1/2 minutes.' There's a kind of literalism in the writing of recipes that is scary."

But making those initial attempts to cook, especially without the recipe script, also is frightening.

"One of the first things to recover from is fear," Kafka says. "So what if it isn't the world's best dish? Nobody's going to have a fit."

"People like safety," Ekus says. "They ask, 'What happens if it fails?' Well, we didn't learn to walk the first time we tried. Yet some people don't even want to take that first step."

Part of being comfortable without culinary crutches is a properly outfitted kitchen, emphasizes Linda Gassenheimer, a teacher and author of "Dinner in Minutes."

"If you keep the right staples, you can just pick up a few fresh things on the way home. People need recipes at first as a guideline, then just for ideas ... so you don't get stuck with just doing roast chicken and baked potatoes.

"After a while you can take the idea from a recipe and develop it with what you have at home, applying any techniques that you've learned.

"When I teach, I teach techniques. A technique is more valuable than a recipe."

Kafka adds that "in any recipe there's always a principle involved. Some books set out to teach basic techniques, but every recipe contains at least one principle to be learned."

"It's best if you start with a repertoire of recipes to work from," says Flo Braker, president-elect of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. "But be adventurous; branch out. Some things work; some don't. Don't worry if they don't."

Many do worry, however.

"The plague of my existence," Waxman says, "is people who look approvingly through a cookbook and then ask, 'Do the recipes work?'

"The recipes are not there to work; YOU are there to work. You are supposed to use your own brains and judgment and pay attention to what's going on."

On the other hand, cooking is more than throwing any ingredients into a pan and hoping they'll come out edible.

"Before I started reading lots of recipes, I thought I knew how to cook," says Heidi Cusick, a California cookbook writer. "I thought you just put interesting things together. But then I had all these catastrophes.

"So I decided I needed to learn something, and I started following recipes to see how things were done. Now I have much more confidence."

Most experienced cooks agree you must taste what you make.

"You create a taste memory for yourself," Kafka says. "That's a critical element. Developing taste memory and then re-creating from it ... Does it need salt? Or more acidity? Or spiciness? Sometimes you learn there's a group of flavorings that seem to go together, that make the dish have an Indian overtone or Mexican or Italian or Asian."

When do you realize you don't have to rely on a recipe?

"There was a turning point when I went to the store and knew it was OK if they didn't have a specific vegetable in the produce section I could substitute," recalls the IACP's Braker. "Now I check what looks good, what's fresh and beautiful. Then I build around that."

"At some point, you just do it," Kafka says. "At best, cooking is an experimental procedure. I don't always know what I'm going to get. Sometimes it's a wonderful surprise. Only once in a great while do I have to throw it out and make spaghetti."

Taste is very important, she asserts. "The flavor will lead you. It's a myth that there is only one authentic way to do something. I've cooked all over the world, and there are lots of times where Mrs. So and So down the street does it differently. Obviously there are other ways. Some may be easier and some techniques better, but only in our world do we futz about doing things in such specific ways.

"If you don't have very much food, you have to use what's at hand."

And that is the name of the game.

At some cooking schools, the final exam consists of just putting some ingredients in front of the students then telling them to create a three-course meal, Waxman says.

"You can only do that if you know what their properties are, how they taste and which cooking methods will work best."

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Photo (1-2--Color) Being able to venture beyond a written recipe frees you to become a more creative cook. Using a few of these ingredients, a home cook can come up with an imaginative and tasty entree. Bob Fila/Chicago Tribune