What's For Dinner?

So after spending an evening last week winnowing down reams of recipes I have collected - but never made - over the past several years (including 5 years' worth of pages torn out of cooking magazines while monitoring the culinary landscape from the PR department at Johnson & Wales), I read this story in the New York Times yesterday:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/a-recipe-for-simplifying-life-ditch-all-the-recipes/

And it got me to thinking ... home ec should be as important a skill covered in schools as literacy and mathematics. Cooking is scary if you don't think you know what you're doing! My everything-from-scratch mom taught me some basics (I was a reluctant student at the time), but I was a strict by-the-recipe girl until enough sessions with professional chefs at J&W (one of the perks of my job) showed me that you don't always need measuring cups and spoons. Or even the ingredients on the list.

It took until I was 30. That ain't right.

As of this week, my new mantra is courtesy of Edouard de Pomiane (I think I came across this via a link in the NYT story comments, but now I can't find anything of the sort):

"The first thing you must do when you get home, before you take off your coat, is to go to the kitchen and light the stove. ... Next, fill a pot large enough to hold a quart of water. Put it on the fire, cover it and bring it to the boil. What's the water for? I don't know, but it's bound to be good for something."

Oh, and this Eggplant "Pasta" is what I made for dinner tonight ... it only took me a few years after printing it out:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/eggplant-pasta-recipe/index.html

Good thing I had that water boiling, because the eggplant shrank down, and we needed some pasta pasta to supplement. I have missed cooking dinner since school started ... working two jobs and being a first-year teacher hasn't left a lot of time for kitchen experimentation.

Photo credit: massdistraction via flickr