Cooking Lessons

It’s cool to watch a pro like Mateo Granados go to work. He chops garlic without watching his fingertips. He flips a fried egg without looking at the pan. The egg veers off in the air on its own trajectory, not straight up and down but flying in an arc so you know it’s going to come down somewhere other than where it went up, but Mateo keeps an eye peeled and catches it in the pan with a perfect nonchalant soft landing.

I was watching Granados give cooking lessons last spring at the Guerneville School garden. He had fava beans, spring garlic, fresh herbs and chard piled on a primitive outdoor counter and with the help of students he was making a picnic banquet of salad and Yucatan huevos rancheros.

The occasion was a lunch and awards ceremony to salute the school’s garden supporters that included parents, volunteers, financial benefactors and celebrities such as Marian Burros, the New York Times food writer, and Clark Wolf, the Guerneville resident—foodie and author of the recently published [ITAL]American Cheeses.

We watched Granados cook like it was a church service or a live dramatic performance, which of course it was, and probably no one knew that better than Mateo, flipping a sauté pan’s ingredients into the air with a deft little hand-and-wrist motion that was a simple gesture of purpose and economy—a practiced, intuitive and mesmerizing display that made us all want to applaud.

“You’re watching a guy flip an egg,” I said to myself. “No need to get all mystical about it.” But in my notes that day I wrote: “Watching Mateo Granados flip an egg is like listening to Otis Spann play the piano.”

I was taking notes because I’m trying to learn how to cook. It’s leading me to an appreciation of ingredients that taste good, look good and smell good even before you’ve touched them.

Mateo talked about the importance of using every bit of the greens, even the leaves with bug-bitten holes. He sauteéd chard, blanched asparagus, added fava beans and mescal, tossed it all with a vinaigrette and nodded at the students who served us the salad on paper plates. “Incredibly good-tasting,” I wrote. “Crunchy, fresh and tangy.”

When he added chopped spring garlic to olive oil in a sauté pan and the aroma wafted out over the audience,  a little girl sitting next to me said, “That smells good.”

For the huevos rancheros Mateo used Petaluma Farms eggs (certified organic) cooked over-easy in his small blackened sauté pan. He served the huevos on top of tortilla chips, topped with queso fresco, the white Mexican cheese that is like feta, and spiced that with El Yuca habañero salsa that Mateo makes from organic Sonoma County-grown habañero peppers, onions, carrots, vinegar, and vintner Lou Preston’s olive oil.

Granados has become a familiar presence preparing his Yucatan tamales at Sonoma County farmers markets. He came here in 1995 from San Francisco where he worked at Masa’s, the high-end French restaurant in San Francisco. He grew up in Yucatan, and at Guerneville School he recalled gathering fresh locally grown ingredients as a kid in Mexico and how disorienting it was to come to the U.S. and find “everything wrapped in plastic.”

He said he’s been asked, “What is a fava?” by American adults at local farmers markets. His answer is, “How old are you?”

I’m glad he didn’t ask me that. It’s not that I don’t know what a fava is, or that I can’t cook, but I’ve always been a “guy cook” who grew up in the Southern California suburbs where we gathered our ingredients at Von’s Supermarket.

When I left home to go to college I lived in an animal house with similar guys, a bunch of surfers who were all well-versed at boiling potatoes, frying hamburgers, and worshipping quantity over quality. We read no cookbooks, had little money and even less patience. Those were my formative years in the kitchen.

I branched out when I got married, but not by much since I happened to marry a truly good cook, which can be a little intimidating. Even now, if left on my own I tend to slip back into the old ways, eating a greasy taco over the kitchen sink.

About a year ago I vowed to progress beyond my repertoire of chili, pasta with meat sauce, and garlic bread.

I took a cooking class, the first one ever held at the Monte Rio Community Center’s new demonstration kitchen, which has room for an audience. There were about 30 of us and it was like we were watching a TV food show except you could actually smell something cooking.

“Everybody’s house should smell like soup all the time,” said Patty James, the Sebastopol nutritionist who was teaching us how to make soup from scratch, starting with stock.

Patty James chopped an onion with an eight-inch chef’s knife. She said the right kitchen knife is “the one that feels good in your hand.”

I liked Patty James’ attitude. She said “throw” when she meant ‘add.’ “Throw in a little olive oil,” said Patty James. “Twist off the stems and throw it in,” she said when adding parsley to the stock.

A woman in the audience asked about old chili powder. If it’s more than five years old, said Patty James, “Throw it away.”

Patty James praised fresh organic food as the key to cooking, eating and living well. “I’m in tune with myself,” said Patty James. “I just want you to be aware of what your body is telling you. You should be eating five to nine cups of vegetables a day. Eat more vegetables. I don’t mean French fries.”

After the class, everyone held hands. We all ate soup together and drank glasses of wine. We were strangers talking about seasonings, whether the soup needed salt, and stuff we liked to eat. We were brothers and sisters of the kitchen.

Cooking classes seemed important to sample, but I’m not really a class-taking person. Food shows on TV are OK too, at least when celebrity chefs are making something that’s within reach of an amateur at home. It’s nice to watch Emeril on the Food Channel taste something wonderful and say “Oh yeah, babe” and tell us how he wishes there was “Smellovision.”

But school, I guess, is something I tend to resist. It’s why God invented hooky. And cookbooks, which I now have piled up on the table by the couch at home to read not just for recipes but to find out how a good cook thinks.

“It’s important to cook in the right frame of mind,” said British chef Simon Hopkinson in his book [ITAL]Roast Chicken and Other Stories, which has been called “the most useful cookbook ever.” (“You’re reading that cookbook,” said my wife, Mary. “What came over you?” “I don’t know,” I said. “I just picked it up.”)

“Go by instinct and taste rather than exact instructions,” said Hopkinson. “That’s what cooking is all about.”

Hopkinson was persuasive talking about the importance of finding good ingredients (“See good things, buy them.”) and about inattention ruining even the best ingredients. “A poor cook will produce a poor dish,” said Hopkinson, “even from a Bresse chicken.” A Bresse chicken, which I’d never heard of, is a French product, “a posh bird … the finest in the world,” said Hopkinson. “It is nurtured and cosseted like no other living creature … with the possible exception of Kobe cattle, which are fed beer and given a daily massage.”

One of my cooking goals was to learn to roast chicken and feel as though I knew what I was doing. Mary makes a transcendent roast chicken that she gleaned from Judy Rodgers’ [ITAL]Zuni Café Cookbook, so I began to read that book.

“Small chickens ... flourish at high heat, roasting quickly and evenly,” said Rodgers. “Don’t substitute a jumbo roaster,” said J.R. “A whole fryer makes a great roaster—it’s the size of a bird favored for spit-roasted chickens.”

Judy Rodgers’ roast chicken requires three things: a small chicken, high heat and “salting the bird” at least a day in advance.

I bought an “air-chilled” chicken (it contains less water) at Whole Foods and went to work. Judy Rodgers said to heat up a 10-inch oven-proof skillet over medium heat, wipe the salted chicken dry and “set it breast side up in the pan. It should sizzle.”

I put the frying pan with the sizzling chicken in the oven at 475 degrees, crossed my fingers and watched. If I’ve learned anything at all it’s that good cooks try to pay attention to what they’re doing. The way I’ve always cooked. I’m also daydreaming about yesterday and tomorrow, watching cable news and talking on the phone. These are bad habits if you want to avoid burning the dinner.

“Always checking,” said Judy Rodgers, “tasting, looking, smelling and feeling as you cook is not difficult.” If I had to choose one cookbook to take while stranded on a desert island (and it would have to be an island with lots of fresh produce, meat, fish, chicken, wine, ice, charcoal, eggs, butter, olive oil, salt, pepper, and high-speed Internet), it would be [ITAL]The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. “Succulent” is a word J.R. uses a lot. “Tender succulence” is what “really distinguishes this chicken,” said Judy Rodgers, “and this you can achieve at home.”

It worked. My chicken came out of the oven in 45 minutes, just like she said it would—beautifully brown and crispy on the outside, tender and moist on the inside. I had achieved succulence. And what’s more, I knew I could do it again.

Such hope that can flow from well-roasted chicken!