History of The Non-GourmetTM

"Hello, my name is Kylie and I’m a non-gourmet."

I’ve never really liked fancy foods. And I never really learned to cook when I was growing up. When I started college, I could count on one hand the number of meals I knew how to cook from scratch, and still have fingers left over.

And now I’m starting a blog about cooking. Why? Why not! I figure that I can’t be the only person that likes what some people would call plain, simple foods. And I have some recipes that I’ve developed over the years that I thought I might share.

So how did I get here from being a non-cook? It wasn’t exactly an easy journey. Fasten your seat belts, this may be a rough ride.

I grew up in the 1970’s, with two older brothers and no sisters, in middle-class suburbia. Most of the other kids in the neighborhood were boys, my mother was an only child, and we lived several hundred miles from my father’s family. So I had very little contact with girls my age until I started school, and even then I had few girlfriends. By then I was more interested in climbing trees and sports than “girl’s stuff” anyway. I was a tomboy through and through.

My parents are semi-professional musicians. Since before I was born (no – since before they were even married), they played in bands and orchestras every chance they could – which frequently meant 3 or 4 different groups in any given week. My father also worked a regular job, and my mother taught music lessons in our house. All of which meant that we weren’t home in the evenings and on weekends much, and meals were often just thrown together from canned goods.

When I was very little, our built-in oven quit working. My dad, being a bit of a do-it-yourselfer, refused to pay anyone else to fix or replace it, but since he never had the time or inclination to actually do it himself, it never got fixed, and it was a major bone of contention with my mother. One year, he saw his chance to get off the hook. Another of his interests (and in fact much of his work) was in electronics, and he heard about this new technology that was being developed, and as soon as the product hit the market he went and bought it. Yes, we were the first family in the entire neighborhood to own a microwave! Most people had never even *heard* of a microwave when we got ours. It certainly wasn’t fancy. It had a dial to set the time and a button to start it. If you wanted to set the microwave to cook for less than five minutes, you had to turn the dial past the five, then turn it back to the desired time. And if you wanted to cook something (like a turkey!) for more than 25 minutes, you had to reset the timer periodically, because it only went up to 25 minutes.

From that moment on, my mother cooked everything she could in the microwave. There were very few books or magazines about microwave cooking, so she mostly learned by trial and error. Soon, the only things she didn’t cook in the microwave were fried foods, which she cooked in an electric skillet; and green beans or her “stuffed peppers” (which weren’t peppers stuffed with anything, it was more like peppers stuffed in a rice dish), both of which she cooked in a pressure cooker on the stove. After a while, she even cooked pasta in the microwave!
And so I never really learned to cook. The year after I graduated high school, I went to the local college while living at home. But I quickly grew bored with school, and told my parents I was taking a year off. I had gotten a job at a Chick-fil-A, where I learned how to deep fry chicken and fries, and how to make lemonade, coleslaw, potato salad, chicken salad, and lemon meringue pie. I even learned how to make the ice cream mix!

After my one year break, I headed off to a college two hours away. I lived in the dorm the first year there, and the dorm food really wasn’t that great. So the next year, I moved into an apartment with a roommate. Finally I had my own kitchen! And like any good college student, I spent the next 2 years cooking hot dogs, beanie wienies, macaroni and cheese, canned ravioli, and cheeseburgers. Oh sure, every now and then we made spaghetti – using either canned sauce or tomato paste, water and a seasoning packet! Then I met my soon-to-be-husband. And my entire way-of-cooking changed.

When we met, my husband was basically homeless, working the night shift as a certified nursing assistant and sleeping on a friend’s couch during the day. When we moved in together, his (now our) friend bemoaned the loss of my husband’s spice collection. Yes, I married a man who knows how to cook! And from watching him cook dinner, I learned the main secrets of cooking good wholesome non-gourmet food.

Thus was born The Non-Gourmet™. Tune in next time for the first recipe I ever learned.