Blogocentric Formulations

Jeff the Chef (only my parents call me Cheffrey)

Prompt #115: If you could magically learn any one skill overnight, what would you choose and what would you do with it?

If I could learn any skill overnight, I think I'd want to suddenly be able to be a really good cook. I love good food and I can follow a basic recipe, but I'm not what you'd call comfortable in the kitchen. It doesn't come naturally to me, and I certainly don't know the first thing about combining ingredients or developing flavors on the fly. So I would love to have a set of culinary skills that allows me to make great food with less effort so that I could enjoy it more often.

I've always struggled with cooking because I hate to waste food, and I know that you have to sometimes get it wrong to practice and develop your craft. But something just seems so wasteful about having to spend money on food and then throw it out because you overcooked it, or messed up the ingredients in some way. I'd love to be able to bypass that entire "trial and error" phase of learning to cook and just instantly know how to throw something together that will taste pretty good, at the absolute worst.

American cuisine would probably be the most obvious choice for what kind of food I'd want to cook well, but I wouldn't mind being good at Italian and French dishes (and barbecue!) as well. But I also know that sometimes it's better when you can just appreciate something without knowing all the ins and outs of how something is made, so I think I'd want to just enjoy Asian inspired dishes (Chinese, sushi, Thai, Vietnamese, etc.) without necessarily being able to create them myself. It would also be nice to be able to bake, although in some ways that's an entirely different skillset.

Anyway, I'd definitely choose to become a skilled chef overnight. I feel like that would be a game-changer in terms of the quality of life my family and friends and I could enjoy. Or at least our tastebuds could enjoy.