When I got married for the first time neither my wife nor I knew how to cook, we had not been trained for that. We were very young and our parents had spoiled us by freeing us from housework so that we would be good students.
My knowledge in the kitchen was not even enough for good scrambled eggs, they would burn and stick to the pan, my wife was a little ahead of me because at least hers didn't burn.
But neither of us made a tragedy out of that lack of experience. On the contrary, we set out to learn, we bought every recipe book that came our way and between the two of us we started experimenting in the kitchen, trying to reproduce the simple dishes our mothers used to make.
I remember that the first kitchen utensils we bought were a pressure cooker and a machine to make arepas, a kind of corn dumpling that is a typical dish of our country and serves as an accompaniment to many meals. We equipped our kitchen as we learned.
Within a few months we were able to make a good-tasting chicken stew, soft and well-seasoned black beans, and lizard meat soup without the vegetables falling apart.
When the kids were born I had to spend a lot of time with them since my wife was starting college. Between the two of us we divided our time in the kitchen. On one end of the wall we had a calendar with the dates that each of us had to cook, and on one side the menus for each day.
During the week we each cooked when we could, usually in the afternoon or evening. We would make the food, store it in the refrigerator, and heat it up at serving time. From a very young age our children learned to eat reheated food, and that was never a problem for them.
Weekends were different, we always tried to prepare something special and to eat the food that was made at the time.
That first marriage came to an end and in the time I was living alone I always prepared my own food.
By the time of my second marriage I was quite trained, I was able to help a lot more in the kitchen, my second wife also had a great knowledge to prepare tasty meals. She liked to make more elaborate dishes that required more preparation time, which she did on weekends when there was more time.
Since we both worked we would prepare the food at night and reheat it the next day, fortunately we were all used to that system.
As time has gone by I have become more sensitive to my stomach, some seasonings are bad for me. I almost always cook my own food with very basic ingredients, little salt, no spice, no cumin. Sometimes when my wife tells me she is going to eat what I have made I spice it up a bit.
Of the things I cook the ones my wife likes the most are lentil soup and potato and onion tortillas. She also really likes the bread I make.
Until recently I learned that bread could be made without chemical yeast by using a natural leaven called sourdough, which is a mixture of flour in which the yeast forms. I set out to learn how to do it that way. At first it took me a while to make the sourdough but I found a way to make it by leaving a handful of raisins in the flour mixture for a few days.
This sourdough bread has a more potent flavor, but it takes longer to make because the natural leaven takes longer than the chemical yeast.
Every three days I assemble my breads with a very simple formula. Two tablespoons of sourdough for every four hundred grams of flour, salt to taste, two teaspoons of sugar, one or two tablespoons of olive oil, a tablespoon of ground oregano and the necessary water so that the mixture is not hard.
This bread takes very little kneading, the minimum so that all the ingredients are mixed and there are no lumps in the flour. Once it is kneaded, it is necessary to wait about three hours for the sourdough to do its work. Then it is baked for forty minutes in a pan with a lid, it is taken out to finish browning for about twenty minutes more. The result will be a very different bread from the one you normally buy at the bakery. It is worth the wait.
I now share a lot of time with my wife's family, a group of four women. All my sisters-in-law enjoy cooking and always find a reason to share a special meal, which keeps the family together.
I am publishing this post motivated by the initiative proposed by my friend @ericvancewalton, Memoir Monday, in the forty two week. For more information click on the link.
Thanks for your time.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version).
Logo creado por @themanualbot
