Teesa

Tonight, I made my first decent dinner meal. This is a huge milestone. In the past, my experience with dinner prep during the periods of independent living often consisted of saying the phrase “I’ll take this to go” and Styrofoam boxes in ThankYou plastic bags. In Kosrae, there aren’t many restaurants where you can say that, because there aren’t many restaurants, period. This leaves the hungry with two options: learn how to cook, or continue current plan of eating canned pork & beans.

I’m fairly spoiled by the fact that I get care packages of food sent to me. In all honestly, we don’t really need care packages of food to survive on this island; the basics are here. Severely limited and over represented by canned meats and ramen, but here. The unintended purpose of food care packages are to serve as reminders of my ineptitude in the kitchen.

Cooking is physically hard work. I blame food blogs like Tastespotting and people like Rachel Ray who somehow led me astray believing that cooking is an easy, beautiful process, and one can do it with nice hair and take wonderful pictures throughout the process. It’s false, false to the extreme.

Episode 1: Cooking ground beef with Nate, another WorldTeach volunteer.

With lofty goals of preparing a grand meal to thank the people who have been hospitable to us thus far in Kosrae, Nate and I instead nearly caused food poisoning to half the community. How ground beef can be burnt black outside, but bleeding red inside, is a feat that can only be accomplished by the most inept of inept. Two hours of cooking resulted in blood burgers and WWIII in the kitchen. Luckily, no one died that night, and we have not been excommunicated from the community.

Episode 2: Scaling a fish with Kristen, a roommate.

Kristen, one of my three wonderful roommates, just graduated from college in the East Coast and her arms are seasoned from her life’s commitment to athletics thus far. Still, with Kristen’s arms and my knife, we were no match for the fish we were trying to gut and scale. That night, the blood of three was taken: Hers, mine, and the fish. Gutting a fish is disgusting. There is nothing FoodNetwork-y or FoodBlog-esque about this part in food prep. Gutting, or rather, engaging in a tug of war battle with fish guts, resulted in gills and guts spewed about a blood spattered countertop. Still, this process was better than scaling, which was me dangling a fish upside down, trying not to gag, and causing scales to project themselves to distances that reached the dining table. Hours later that night, I was still picking scales out of my hair.

With these two episodes as the back story, you hopefully understand why earlier tonight was momentous. I took a chicken through the whole shebang: defrosting, washing, cutting, washing some more, marinating, cooking, seasoning to taste, eating. And it was good and edible. Sure, I forgot an ingredient or two, but the operative word is edible. On the stove is a pot of fully cooked chicken that can be eaten without fears of food poisoning, which is a lot more than what I could have said earlier. This moves mountains, because if a person can successfully cook a chicken, there isn’t much that she can’t do now is there? =)