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Learn at Home, Cook on the Road

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The interesting thing about this woman is that there was a guy there who also believed that he was Jesus Christ, and I don't know if it was by accident or by design but they always seemed to avoid each other.

The guy who thought he was Jesus was a lot nicer than the lady who thought she was Jesus. Sometimes he would do this fantastic rendition of Heartbreak Hotel in the dining room on his beat-up guitar (I couldn't make up something that good). He also would just lie in bed and speak in tongues, which was harmless enough but a little freakier than the Elvis impersonations.

I had been living on a kibbutz (Bar-Am) for four months before Jerusalem. It was up in the north, also a cold spot, and the warmest, nicest jobs were in the kitchen. Sometimes I had to pick apples with everyone else, but I managed to get assigned to the kitchen most of the time.

My job was mainly chopping carrots and throwing onions and potatoes in this big industrial rough-edged drum that spun them around until the skin came off. We cooked for about 500 people every day so there was a lot of food involved.

The 20 or so pounds of onions every day were my favorite food to work with because I only had to chop off the ends and the peeler did the rest. Potatoes were boring because there was nothing to really do. Carrots were a pain because I had to chop them into thin slices and pay attention to not cut myself. Onions, on the other hand, gave me time to think.

A lot of us from the kibbutz had decided for different reasons to live in Jerusalem after our apple-picking tour of duty was over and we all wound up at the same hostel.

In Israel, every Friday night people get together and have a big dinner to celebrate the beginning of the Sabbath. Shabbat dinner, it's called, and even though I'm not Jewish I quickly got into the spirit.

One Friday night, the manager of the Petra, Ted, noticed the nice meal I made for my four or five friends and asked me where I learned to cook. The next morning he caught me on my way out the door and asked me if I had a job yet. I didn't, and I was pretty much only eating the one meal a day that I made for friends.

I gladly accepted his offer of employment, but Ted was a hard guy to work for. He told me I'd have autonomy but he soon got on this kick where he wanted every meal nutritionally balanced. At first I had attacked my mission with zeal, but since I worked seven days a week and did all the shopping for whatever we cooked that night, I started getting lazy and making pasta and bean soup and things like that.

The guests didn't complain. I tried to make things tasty and most budget travelers were happy for a huge two-dollar plate of spaghetti. Most of them were also happy to talk to me, since I'd been living in the country for a while and could give them pointers.

I had a little jar where people paid and on good nights would give myself a two or three dollar bonus. At that time, living in the inexpensive Old City, that was my money for a few days of hookah and coffee sessions.

All good things come to an end and it didn't take long for Ted to lay down the law—he tightened up the financial situation when one night I dipped a little too deep and he didn't recoup his costs. He also told me that every meal needed to have meat (adding to costs and forcing me to make due on less), a fruit or vegetable, and, if possible, a dessert.

One day I thought I was smart when I bought about 30 bananas and gave them out as both a fruit and a dessert.

When I handed Ted a bowl of split pea soup with sausage (a cheap and easy house favorite) along with a banana, he had a fit.

He threw the banana on the ground and started jumping up and down. I thought he was going to squash it to make a point, but he picked up the banana and shoved it in my face.

"This," he said to me, "is not a fruit. This is a banana."

I tried to explain that bananas are fruits, but then he started yelling.

I stomped upstairs and almost quit, but when I came down he had a change of heart. He admitted that on further reflection bananas technically were fruits but he'd been hoping for something that took more preparation.

I told him I saw his point, but we still had a few more run-ins, mainly having to do with him requesting a certain dish that I didn't make to his liking.

A few times he'd tell me he was going out with friends and to save him a dinner. In the rush of serving up guests and kidding around with people I'd sometimes only leave him with a spoonful or two of each item.

More than once would I fluff up with a fork the little bit of beans that were left for him or quickly cook him something as he yelled at me and asked my silent back how I could do this to him again. He had me on that one.

We definitely had a sort of love-hate relationship. When it was good, it was great. When it was bad, it was bad. I eventually landed an internship at a news organization (the reason I went to Israel) and dropped my cooking gig. But, I still lived at the hostel and when I said I was moving out Ted talked me out of it and gave me a good deal on a private room.

Besides opening my eyes to the opportunities of cooking on the road, my time at the Petra taught me something I could have never learned in cooking school and something I like to repeat often when asked for a recipe. The most important ingredient when preparing a meal is, well, love.

The Kitchen Sutra

If this tragicomic tale hasn’t given you indigestion, read on for the most important part: Learning to cook.

A cookbook is a good idea, as is watching cooking shows. You shouldn’t really try to get recipes from cooking shows, but techniques. Watch the way the cook on these shows holds a knife, watch how they measure, touch the food. Cooking is a very tactile thing, and you see this as you watch a cooking show.

Look at the hands on these shows. Unfortunately, a byproduct of the otherwise pretty good trend of celebrity chefs is that the camera tends to focus on their faces, not their hands—the culinary experience, the cooking or the eating, happens within the hands, mouth, eyes, and nose. Regardless, watch the hands as much as possible and note the way they handle the food. It might seem like a small thing, but like an athlete or a lover, success happens in the space between gestures almost too small to measure.

You’ll pick up tips, styles, and general principles that can’t be gleaned from a list of ingredients.

When you do cook yourself, there are two ways to start. The absolute beginner might want to begin by jazzing up the simple recipes. Don’t laugh, but fixing up macaroni and cheese with fresh mozzarella and/or some sausage (slightly burnt, like all sausage should be, in my opinion) is a good way to master the basics of flavors and timing. Sounds easy, but not everybody does it.

You’ll find that in many ways ambition is one of the most important ingredients in cooking. It’s not so hard to whip up something edible, but when you’re hungry you have to push yourself a little to try something new.

The other way to go is to start making completely new recipes. Remember though, the point of this exercise isn’t to learn to cook for yourself, but to cook for big groups. Go ahead and start with easy recipes that don’t have too many steps or ingredient, but try to cook for as many people as possible. There’s a world of difference between pasta for two and pasta for twenty. It's quite a trick to get three or four courses out on time for many people, so practice and then practice some more.

The quantity of the food you’ll be handling is the most obvious difference. But in cooking, since you’re always working backwards, in a way, a large amount of mouths means a large amount of clean plates and silverware, the utensils to dish people up quickly, the large pots and pans that can cook a lot of food at once, and all the cutting, peeling, grinding, that you’ll need to do before you even get the food in the pan. Then, of course, there’s the shopping.

As far as shopping goes, this means buying a lot. Easy when you’re at home and have a car to haul your purchase back home. In another country, there’s a good chance you’ll be hauling by hand the food back to wherever you’ll be cooking. Although Dr. Atkins will be rolling in his grave, if you can manage to keep a lot of starchy basics on hand—rice, bread, potatoes, pasta—you can make the meat and veggies you buy go a lot further and can always cheat a little if you get an unusually large crowd, or, like in my case, if you get caught up with making new friends and forget to leave your boss some chow.

One advantage to cooking abroad is that you’ll probably use a lot more fresh meats and vegetables than you do at home. There won’t be many frozen or processed options to lean on, and that alone will elevate the taste of your cooking. Once you’ve cooked with fresh ingredients, you’ll never go back. After all, cooking isn’t magic, it’s just a good combination of ingredients cooked in the right way for the right amount of time.

If you're out on the road and approach a hostel owner with your bright idea and they're not interested, never fear. You can always start a dinner collective with friends like I did and start by letting them cover the cost of food. If your cooking catches on, you can start charging new hostel guests $1-2 a plate.

Word travels fast in hungry traveler circles, and if you manage to put together a Mexican meal in Japan, say, you’ll have other travelers knocking on your door with a burrito jones in no time.

Bon appetit, and don’t hesitate to send us your favorite on-the-road recipes.

Josh Krist is the publisher and designer of InsideOut Travel.

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