Deane's view: Cooking up a storm

Some live to cook. Others cook to live.

There is, obviously, a wide spectrum of cooks – from the basic to the gourmet. Count me among the former.

In our second March nor’easter of last winter, we lost power for two nights sandwiched around a full day. We have an electric stove, a toaster oven, a microwave – all dependent upon electricity. What to do?

Unfortunately, virtually the entire city was without power, so we couldn’t order a pizza, for example. Only later did we discover that one local parlor was running on a generator.

Still, we have a woodstove, which had been fired up to heat the house in the way we had done in our younger years. On top of that stove is a custom-fitted soapstone top intended for cooking.

So what to cook?

We had a previously purchased supermarket spinach quiche, and we had several cans of Boston baked beans. That would be easy, I thought, and it was.

The next day, I was telling my neighbor, who is on the gourmet end of the cooking spectrum.

“Guess what? I cooked a meal on the woodstove last night.”

“Really, what did you have?”

I told him.

“You call that cooking?” he replied with a laugh.

“It took some work,” I protested. “It counts. It was applying heat to edible ingredients.”

I probably inherited my cooking gene from my father. As my mother often noted, “He could fry an egg, but that was about it.”

In my first apartment, back in the ‘60s, I used to be a “big batch” cook so that I could cook once, then subsist for days on leftovers.

For example, I would make macaroni salad by boiling a box of elbows and adding two cans of tuna and a can of peas. The whole conglomerate was stirred up with mayonnaise. I would do the same with a box of spaghetti and a jar of sauce. And yet I still live.

Over the intervening years, since I was married, I have done the home maintenance chores and my wife has done most of the cooking. She adds things, like spices and seasonings and tidbits, that I would never think of. It worked out better that way.

In retirement, however, I pitch in more – shopping, getting out the ingredients, stirring, serving, cleaning up, putting things away … .

I tend to be a tad impatient as a cook, so I usually crank up the burners to “high,” which resulted in a little problem the first time I used the new electric stove – smoke from the frying hamburger set off the smoke alarm tied into our house alarm system. The West End fire responders were soon at the door.

“Oops. Sorry about that.”

Similarly, it seems a bit of a fuss to go out onto the patio to use the gas barbecue grill. That’s just more work to produce the same result. So we have had the same tank of propane gas for the past several years. At least the grill has at times served as a handy home for a random field mouse.

One meal I have truly cooked is beef stew. I do it in a crock pot by following the steps in the accompanying guide book: stirring chunks of stew beef in flour, dicing up potatoes and onions, slicing carrots lengthwise, adding mushrooms and celery, then spicing up the concoction with beef broth, salt and pepper, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, paprika and a bay leaf. Then, I just turn on the crock pot for six hours. Done. The meal serves two – at the original time and once again on another day, which echoes my earliest cooking attempts.

I have even expanded upon my earliest spaghetti recipe by adding onions and peppers and garlic to the jar of commercial sauce, plus some previously cooked and frozen meatballs.

So, while I am not yet a gourmet cook, I’m at least a little further along the spectrum. I still don’t enjoy the task. But I want to live.

Stuart Deane lives in Newburyport.