Everyone needs a cooking buddy.


Everyone needs a friend to bounce ideas off of and share recipes with. Websites are great for discovering new recipes. Shows are fantastic for learning new techniques, tips and tricks. But, without a friend you can call in the middle of making your first chicken stock, it’s just not the same.


I started cooking for real when I was 22. I had a real apartment, a real job and a real salary (if you can call a teacher’s salary ‘real’). I figured it was time to start cooking for real. No more eating bagels and bagged salads every night. I had the tools, I had cookbooks, I had my mom just a phone call away. What I didn’t have was a cooking buddy.

This was 2002. Food Network was nowhere near what it is now. We didn’t really use the Internet for recipes yet. And, my friends weren’t cooking much – we were all just out of college. All I cooked that year was my mom’s repertoire. Her 8-10 go-to, weekday recipes – things like goulash, spaghetti, tacos and beef & noodles. This was a good first step..I knew the way these recipes were supposed to taste so I was able to work my way through them while learning simple cooking techniques. I learned timing, how to clean as I worked and how to organize my ingredients. I learned the basics.


But the next year was monumental in my cooking upbringing. 2003 was the year I met my first foodie buddy – Renee. Renee loved to cook. She had more than just a few standby recipes. She tried new things. In short, Renee cooked like a grown-up.

Renee is the reason I alter recipes almost every single time I make them. She’d tell me about a certain recipe and say ‘the recipe said to use ‘x’, but I used ‘M’ instead’. I was an control-freak about following the recipe, afraid to venture away from what was written…. What? Use chicken stock instead of water? Won’t the whole kitchen explode if I do that? Renee’s methods opened up a whole new world…


Renee is the reason I love Penzey’s. She said, ‘I just discovered this new spice called adobo seasoning…it’s by this company named Penzey’s. Here, take home a ziploc of it.’ I’ve been obsessed ever since…

Renee gave me someone to talk to about cooking, to bounce ideas off of, to inspire and be inspired by. Though our relationship is based on a whole lot more than just cooking at this point, I’d have to say cooking is probably what brought us together in the first place.

And now, 8 years later, she still makes up a huge part of my cooking world (even though she swears pregnancy hormones have robbed her of her cooking skills). We send each other recipes, we compare notes on Penzey’s spices, we’re ‘classmates’ in Martha Stewart’s Cooking School. When we get together, we chat about what we’ve made recently and what we’ve seen on our favorite cooking blogs. She gives me ideas for new concoctions and I assure her she’s still got her cooking mojo (she jokes about starting her own cooking blog called, ‘See What I Burned Today’).


Renee sent me this recipe. She said, ‘omigod…it was so easy, so good, you use bacon grease for the dressing and I didn’t even burn it!’ If that’s not a winning endorsement, I don’t know what is.

Wilted Spinach Salad

Adapted from Nugget Markets
4 cups spinach leaves (loosely packed)
½ medium-sized red onion, julienned
4 slices thick bacon, diced
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons Champagne vinegar
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 hard-boiled egg, chopped fine
Preparation:
Toss together spinach leaves and red onion. Set aside.
In a sauté pan, place bacon with olive oil. Stirring frequently, cook on medium heat until crisp. Remove pan from heat. Whisk in mustard and vinegar. Pour over spinach mixture.
Quickly toss salad and top with hard-boiled egg.