When It Looks and Tastes Like Food: It's Done!

Most things are not as difficult as people make them out to be.

I applied for a part-time job as a barista at a coffee shop near my house. I could, potentially, hop off the train after my day job, make cappicinos for college students, and with my revenue, get $80 more drunk each week. When I go in to apply, the manager, a hippie guy who forgot to eat everyday for the past 3 years, says, "Do you have experience as a barista?"

"I have 24 years of practical experience holding cups and pouring drinks for myself," I say.

I didn't get the job...


Cooking. Another perfect example. A group of friends and I were out for dinner. A pair of them are recently married. The wife says they have appliances they do not know how to use.

"What do you do with a mixer?"

If four of us could have stacked the notes in our voices, we would have made an excellent barbershop quartet when we responded: "Mix things."

Then came the cateloging of reasonable items that require mixing. For example, any dough that is preceded by an adjective: cookie dough, bread dough... Our one friend offered the idea of mashed potatoes.

"Mashed? Potatoes?"
The girl who brought it up proceded cautiously. Was our married chum joking? This launched into a whole orated treatise on how to make mashed potatoes. First, you boil the potatoes. Ah, but how do you know when they're done? Why, you stick a fork in them. A fork! Genius! Then you put them in the mixer... Yes, yes! Go on!

I have few qualms with being a snob, so I'll just go ahead and say it: Are you kidding? Mashed potatoes is the only food where the ingredients and the preparation process are in the name!

And cooking, in general! I'm a fair cook, and the trick to cooking anything is to keep looking at it and when it looks and tastes like food, it's done. If you're cooking fish, and it doesn't look like the food you got last weekend when you ordered it from a restaurant, it's not cooked completely.

When it looks and tastes like food, it's done!