Thoughts from the ammo line

As she says, Ammo Grrrll’s topic today is ROOKIE MISTAKES. She writes:

So enough already with post-election analysis. I want to turn utterly from politics, to a brief restoring respite from them. So our topic today is: Rookie Mistakes. It’s a fun topic that I hope to use as a recurring theme, so I will just cover a couple of categories today. A quip I saw decades ago in Reader’s Digest said, “Architects cover their mistakes with ivy; brides with ketchup and doctors with sod.”

Let me tell you a few of the rookie mistakes I made cooking as a young bride. If only I could have phoned my Mama for advice – but we were too poor to have a phone in 1967. That’s the truth, my hand to God. We had neither a vehicle nor a telephone! And our son and all his friends have THEIR insanely expensive and advanced phones welded permanently to their hands to save time. What a brave new world.

The first mistake I made was even before we were married. We both lived in dorms, but a friend had an apartment and I was determined to wow my tall, cute, smart boyfriend by baking him his favorite Apple Pie. It probably would have made a better impression had I PEELED the apples, but those were Hippie Days and I managed to convince him that the peels were good for you. (turned out I was accidentally right – apple peels are full of Quercetin, one of the ingredients in the anti-COVID cocktail of Vitamins C and D, Zinc and Quercetin recommended by Dr. Joe Rogan!)

A common Rookie Mistake that many novice cooks make is in thinking that any recipe is the equivalent of the Eleventh Commandment on a Stone Tablet. It is not. I admire the bakers among us and there is, of course, artistry involved, but – no disrespect intended at all — mostly baking is chemistry and cooking is artistry. Adding or subtracting ANY ingredient while baking can lead to total failure.

Not so with cooking. Until you have enough experience cooking, you won’t know that you can – within reason – leave something out, put something in, and the dish will turn out fine.

For example, just the other night, I found an intriguing recipe for Curried Squash Apple Soup and I made it without the Squash! Yes, I could not find any Acorn Squash in Sprouts and so used Sweet Potatoes, Yams and Golden Beets instead. It was delicious! But at 20, I was a total slave to the recipe. I once bypassed a nice looking stew for which I had every single ingredient save one. It called for 1/8 tsp of WHITE pepper, which I did not possess and had never even heard of. And so I dared not make it with black pepper. Rookie Mistake!

One handy rule of thumb for recipes from those church cookbooks we inherited from our mothers is “half the sugar and twice the spice.” Spices were terrifying to our mothers’ generation. The cookbooks from the World War II years when there was rationing of sugar featured clever ways to deal with the problem. But with the war over sugar made a major comeback. Mother made cakes that called for 2 cups of sugar in the cake and double that in the frosting. Holy Diabetes, Batman!

Especially when you’re just starting out, attempting something very complicated is not advised. One of my dearest friends, a non-cook, has no cookbook without “Easy” in the title and will attempt no dish with more than five ingredients! She is “wicked smaht” and I have offered to teach her to cook many times, but she chooses not to learn. They sure do eat out a lot more than we do, so there’s that. Maybe she’s on to something!

For a wedding shower gift I received a classic cookbook called The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer, a picture-less encyclopedic tome that was very intimidating.

I honestly don’t even remember WHAT dish I was fixin’ to make, but it had only 7 ingredients listed, so I thought perhaps I could give ‘er a whirl. The very last ingredient was 1 Cup of Brown Sauce (see page 357). In turning to page 357, the recipe for Brown Sauce, which had ELEVEN ingredients, began, “Take five goose livers”…and I said aloud, “Well, THAT’s not going to happen!” Almost 60 years later, I still have never had 5 goose livers on hand.

Though my fellow residents in our Gated Geezer Enclosure would thank me forever for de-livering (haha) five of the Mad Poopers who immiserate those who try to walk on sidewalks here.

Back in the decades before Door Dash, eating out multiple times a week, and ever more exotic supermarkets, the ladies’ magazines were big on a concept called THRIFT. (Look it up, young people!) Since husbands in general were averse to something called “Leftovers,” the articles called them “Planovers.” And to this day, especially cooking for two now, I will think about how a Pot Roast will turn into BBQed Beef sandwiches and eventually the last shreds of beef worked into scrambled eggs with onion, tomato, and chiles, a Mexican breakfast dish called Machaca. Amortized over 3 meals times two people, the per serving cost of the Pot Roast is almost bearable.

Since we are discussing food, it must follow that we should address Rookie Mistakes about Exercising and Fitness. Fitness, particularly if it involves weight loss, is an endless and incremental process. The original Never Ending Story.

Let’s say, hypothetically, Freshman year of college you had not read ANY of the assigned readings in Sociology (some 4,000 pages!) until the last week of the Quarter and were now obliged to “cram.” Since you still had a memory then and your teenage body could live quite nicely on coffee and candy bars for 96 straight sleepless hours, you were still capable of getting an A or for sure a B-plus. This turned out to be a mixed blessing at best. For it made you believe that there was nothing that could not be done at the last minute. And that is untrue. As President Trump would say: Sad!

Unlike cramming for those Liberal Arts exams, you cannot “cram” for a foreign language, Physics, or a 25-lb weight loss into the five days before your 50th High School reunion. I know; I’ve seen me try.

In fact, the most enduring sustained weight loss program I hit upon after decades of failure was to lose just five pounds a year. For five years. AND KEEP IT OFF each year.

It had been time. I had in my late 40s and early 50s, accidentally slipped the surly bonds of the “normal” sizes – 10, 12, 14 – and INTO the dreaded “Plus” sizes found only in specialty Fat Lady Stores. Of course, the first thing the depressed official fat lady finds is that she is now at the BOTTOM of the sizes in those stores! A veritable Rock Star in size 18s which hang on her in a most comfortable non-binding way. But the humiliation of having to go there outweighs the perks of now being considered “tiny” and as quickly as I could, I hustled back to the regular clothing store.

If Amazon had been around then I might still be Size 18.

The Rookie Exerciser, filled with Irrational Exuberance, can make up a most unrealistic exercise chart which we shall call the All Or Nothing Approach. EVERY day I shall walk 3 miles around a small local lake! If I miss one day, I will add those miles to the next day and walk around it twice! Eventually, of course, you end up “owing” yourself a walk around Lake Superior.

And so you give up and just have another doughnut. My new mantra for several years now instead of beating up on myself until I cry and have another doughnut is: “Progress, not perfection.” Besides, you will hear many a person say, “I just love Barb – she’s so funny. I really admire Ernest, he’s so smart.” But, “I adore being around Patricia! She’s just so darn thin,” has been said by nobody ever. Tell me I’m wrong!