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Baby steps in the kitchen

The kaizen way points to beautiful things
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The first dinner party I ever threw in my life was a disaster.

Early in my nineteen-year-old, away-from-home-for-the-first-time epoch, my girlfriend, Dianne, and I shared a small apartment in a funky West End house in Vancouver.

It had an equally funky wooden plaque over the front porch: "El Rancho" it said, along with an illustration of a cowboy riding a bronco. Our place wasn't a far stretch from a ranch hand's bunk, and enjoying our newfound freedom, we felt like cowboys riding bareback. That included inviting pals over for a wild party.

I'll make spaghetti, I said. No big deal — I'd watched my mom throw some sauce together (or that's how it looked), boil up a pot of spaghetti, and toss up a salad. Everyone loved it, and how hard could it be?

Flying sans recipe, and sans experience, I knew some kind of tinned tomato stuff was involved, so I got the biggest tin of Hunt's tomato sauce I could find (no such thing as pre-seasoned sauce). Plus I recognized those tiny tins of tomato paste, so I grabbed a couple too.

Once home, they all got dumped into a big pot, along with some minced onion. Honestly, it must have been, like, two tablespoons; after all, mom had warned, don't use too much onion.

I think Dianne added garlic, since she was half French-Canadian and knew about such things. And oregano was Italian-ish, so in went some of that, along with a sprinkle — note the word "sprinkle" — of salt and pepper.

By now our spaghetti sauce had a few dark flecks floating in it, which looked pretty good, and a few whitish ones. It was kind of thick-looking, though, so we added water. Since all the tomato stuff looked pretty cooked, we simply warmed it all up, and not very long at that.

Lord knows why we never thought of tasting it before serving, but we didn't. So, if you can, picture eating what amounted to watery tinned tomato sauce slathered over starchy spaghetti noodles. Who knew you needed more than a quart of water to boil a whole package in?

Blah!

After such a gross disaster saved only by way too much Ruffino Chianti — the favourite cheap-o wine of 70s beats/bohos/hipsters because it came in a bottle in a basket that made for great candle holders — I became a little more circumspect with my cooking.

I asked my mom for her recipe for spaghetti sauce, one she happily wrote out onto a recipe card, now much tattered and stained. It was from my uncle, who really is Italian. I remember being shocked at how many ingredients went into such a seemingly simply thing, and at how long you were supposed to simmer it to pull out all the flavours.

With the "R" word embedded in our culture this time of year as we resolve to do this and that, I saw a reference to a book the other day that grabbed my attention.

More importantly, it was totally applicable to my first and most critical audience — those young people at Whistler, in fact, young people anywhere — the lifties, the wait people, the clerks and parking attendants — who keep things running while enjoying their first taste of adult life and adventures away from home, including cooking for themselves.

My friend, Daphne Gray-Grant, a successful editor and writer in her own right, alerted me to Robert Maurer's book, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, in her recent edition of Power Writing, a practical, very useful e-newsletter aimed at writers and editors of all levels and all over the world (publicationcoach.com).

Instead of grandiose plans or resolutions, the kaizen way is to do one little thing differently. In a nutshell it goes like this: large goal –> fear –> access to cortex restricted –> failure. But: small goal –> fear bypassed –> cortex engaged –> success.

I love the titles in this little book: "Tiptoe Past Fear"; "Ask Small Questions"; "Think Small Thoughts". Hey, everyone's good at small!

Want to write a novel? Start with a goal so tiny, you can't but succeed: write for three minutes a day! Want to get in shape? How about a thirty-second exercise period?

As for food, if you're ready for better things, whether it's good-tasting meals, saving money, or better health, go for baby steps in the kitchen.

Remember my crappy spaghetti sauce? That was enough to make anyone a take-out addict. What drove me to make my own food more and more were my own mini-discoveries that turned out satisfying, not stupid.

Who can't scramble eggs? I could, and when I started adding cubed cheese, chopped green onion, or salsa, man, I thought I'd gone to heaven. I soon learned I could add corn tortillas and have a full meal-deal. Huevos rancheros, here I come.

I love "parkie" (that's shorthand for "parking attendant") Simon Clarke's story here in this column last year about the yummy triple-cooked potato dish his buddy, Max Zeidler, invented with brothers Sebastian and Stefan, sons of former Whistler councillor, Eckhard Zeidler. They came up with it due to all the good potatoes the Zeidlers grow near Lillooet, and it smacks of all the right ingredients for kitchen success: using things you already love and putting them together in a fun, easy way.

The Zeidler boys love potatoes — what young guys don't? So they figured out they could boil some up, cut them into chunks when they're still a bit hard in the middle, then fry them in butter with seasoning they like — garlic, basil, whatever.

Then you mash it up, leaving some pieces of fried potatoes — golden brown and crispy — and add more seasoning you like. Throw it in the oven with a nice layer of Parmesan on top. About half an hour later, you'll get a great dish with a nice, crispy brown, cheesy layer on top. Sound good, or what?

What do you love to eat? What could you add to it that you love, too? These are the kinds of kaizen questions you can ask yourself in the kitchen. Who knows what amazing results you'll discover?

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who says, go small or go home.