Episode 1 of "I Can't Believe I Ate That."

also, what my eight year old thinks of Chuck E. Cheese might blow your mind

When I was homeschooled in highschool, I made myself instant mashed potatoes every day for lunch, or at least on any day that my lunch was in my control. This went much as you might imagine it did; I boiled tap water, added a pinch of salt because I thought it helped the water boil faster, opened the Hungry Jack box, and measured out the right amount of small ivory flakes of dehydrated potato and flavor additives, except I also added a lil extra because I’m not a monster. I was never satisfied by its cheap boxed taste (I told you, I’m not a monster) so I also stirred in a tab of Land-O-Lakes butter and precisely 1.5 slices of Kraft American cheese until they melted like plastic into the pale off-white mush in the pot. I snacked on the other .5 slice while the potatoes were congealing into a pallid yellowish clump of what looked like an uncooked ball of pastry dough. I would transfer this translucent, gummy, starchy, cheesy, hot and weirdly comforting pallid yellowish clump from a tiny saucepan into a glass bowl; I would then eat it slowly, daintily, with a small spoon. I felt a blend of cozy and luxurious sensations stemming presumably from my own perceived glamour of eating a ‘hot lunch.’ (I still sort of do avoid cold lunch, if I’m honest.) Sometimes I would sneak outside post-mash and light a cinnamon stick with a match and pretend to smoke it. I think this might have been my attempt at a Parisian moment? Even in my instant mash days, a delicious lunch wasn’t enough; I needed something to be romantic about it.

Before you judge, please remember that this was the nineties. And if you want to know how long ago that was, just know that my very precocious and bright eight year old son said to me in the car the other day that “Chuck E. Cheese must be really old, because, I mean…well, it first existed in the nineteen hundreds.” THE. NINETEEN. HUNDREDS. Skull emoji. Skull emoji. SKULL. EMOJI.

SO anyway, I look back at this interesting “lunch” situation and ask myself; did I display this habit of eating the same food every day at any other time in my life? There WAS the daily turkey and cheese sandwich with two boxes of Arizona Iced “Tea” (the tall ones, duh) for my entire middle school career. Far from finding this boring, I remember looking forward every day to the familiar taste of wheat bread, packaged deli turkey, American cheese, lettuce, and Hellman’s mayonnaise; a beautiful, bland, banal American school sandwich with Sun Chips on the side. (Sun Chips, incidentally, are just Doritos for people who think Doritos are unhealthy. Where’s the lie??) I know, I know—right now you might be thinking, ‘Wow girl u really lived for that plane food.” And you wouldn’t be wrong. I’ve always liked things I shouldn’t; instant mashed potatoes, Arizona Iced Tea, Archie Bunker.

The sad fact of the matter is, my mom was and is a really good cook. This means that as a high school student I did not have to be eating boxed mashed potatoes for lunch, but that I actively and happily chose to do this. And I could have probably cooked something better myself, had I had the motivation or desire at the time to do so. I learned a lot from helping her whip up lemon meringue pie (we still chuckle about the time she had me zest an entire huge bag of lemons. I don’t even remember it, but she still feels terrible) or watching her set an idyllic table for a friend coming by. If you ever meet her, ask her about the time she bought beautiful long stemmed strawberries from the farmer’s market and put them out on the dining room table ahead of one of these luncheons; my seven year old brother went in and took one tiny bite out of every single strawberry and put them all back on the plate. This was truly elite level mom trolling, and I am still in awe.

I first got actually curious about cooking when I was sixteen. I helped serve at a small, self-catered banquet that a lady at our church put on for some kind of an event; she had cooked all the food, and there were about sixty people lined up at the buffet that day. Whether it was a wedding or a funeral I can’t remember. Here is what I do recall with diamond-like precision; she made these perfectly poached and almost unbelievably tender chicken breasts with the lemoniest of all lemon cream sauces. These chicken breasts had no business being that delicious, because boneless and skinless chicken breasts are Satan’s breasts, and 9 times out of 10 they are as dry as Satan’s dusty and derelict desert of a heart. And when I say these chicken breasts were poached, I mean that these chicken breasts were the color of instant mashed potatoes, with no golden pan sear, no grill marks, no sign of seasoning except for salt; and yet, somehow, in all their wan ghostliness, they stuck with me as one of the single most enjoyable food bites I can recall taking in my lifetime. I can recall their perfect flavor and texture til this day. That day I learned that poaching is not boiling. Boiling chicken breasts will, in fact, bring you instantly back to awareness that they belong to Satan. They will be crumbly and dry and yet somehow at the same time they will also be rubbery. You will not understand this, and you will dutifully chew and chew and chew on the rubber meat, dousing it in A1 to help yourself out. Poaching, on the other hand, is about maintaining a low enough temperature of cooking liquid that it brings the chicken slowly to the right internal temperature. Poaching, unlike boiling, is lovingly bathing chicken in water, wine, broth, or another liquid that sits between 160 and 180 degrees, never bubbling, slowly cooking the chicken.

I remember that she gave me a look after watching my instant-mashed-potato-mind blowing like a warehouse stuffed with TNT, and then I peppered her with questions. “I could teach you how to cook,” she offered. I felt excited, but I never took her up on it. My foray into cooking wouldn’t happen for years yet, and those years would be filled with horridly overcooked chicken breasts, offensively under-browned mushrooms, broccoli steamed within an inch of its life, and — you guessed it — instant mashed potatoes. Plane food 4 life bbs.

These days I think way more about layering flavors; did you even know about powdered porcini mushrooms?! I put fish sauce in my soups and stews. I make tomato compound butter and then I slather it on bread, meat, pasta, or eat it with a spoon. I understand more about umami and how to work with it. I dry out brioche and cube it and soak it with savory egg and parmesan custard and bake it with asparagus and caramelized onions. I caramelize onions and put them in/on everything. (By the way, any recipe that says some version of ‘cook onions over medium heat until soft and brown, 5 minutes’ needs to be thrown out on its *ss.) It takes minimum 20 minutes and not a minute less to get onions to a blonde caramelization and 30-40 minutes if you want them to look deep golden brown, like they just got scooped out of a caramel jar. I never skip this step if I can help it. It’s the best foundation of flavor for almost any meal I can think of, with perhaps the exception of garlic. And butter. (In my case I like to throw all three into anything and everything)

In closing, though, I figure you might as well know my shame. I eat like an amateur food critic 50% of the time, and the other half it’s … well … somewhere between fast food and plane food. I’m just keeping it real. And right now I have a bag of Ore-Ida instant mashed potatoes sitting in my pantry; I’ve had them for almost two years, because for some reason in my mind these potato flakes will never expire. I don’t know when I will bust out the Kraft singles and make myself a hot lunch; but it sure feels good just knowing that that comforting lil’ bowl of steaming butter-flavored starch is one boiling pot of tap water away.