Food Glorious Food

[davidn]

Now that I'm living alone, one of the greatest concerns that's been on the minds of Whitney and my mother has been my basic survival with regard to being able to cook and eat for myself. My mother has left a variety of food from her visit, most of it unusually healthy for me, so I will have to work out some way of cooking potatoes that don't come in powder form.

Being worried about my cooking may be justified - I am admittedly the only person I know to regularly use a claw hammer as a kitchen utensil - but there is a bigger problem that isn't anything to do with my method of food preparation.

First of all, I've been colourblind all my life. This, combined with the way that I unburdened myself with most of my sense of smell during two years in the Purdie Chemistry labs, means that I have very little facility for telling whether food is off or not. Some things are easy enough - milk is probably undrinkable when it slides out of the carton instead of pours, for example, and carrots are off when you can tie knots in them - but there have been times when I've taken a bite out of something, asked Whitney "Does this smell all right to you?", and she's collapsed into a corner.

So assuming that I don't die from eating out of date smoked ham, the next stage is to be able to cook individual items into something resembling meals. Thanks to my job at the Kintore golf club a couple of summers ago, I am able to cook, but only by using a gigantic hotplate and deep fat frier. Even with more conventional, non-Scottish kitchen equipment, I think that the main downfall of my cooking is the willingness to experiment. Chicken korma with pasta? Works fine. And why not do it with Udon noodles, because they're basically the same thing, aren't they? And there's still some salami in the fridge, so I can chop that up and add it to the curry. It's meat, after all.

That said, there's still a pizza in the freezer, so I'll have that tonight and I'll at least live to fight another day.

Comments

[ethelfleda.livejournal.com]

Korma with pasta is 'fusion cookery' and thus you are doing cuisine, not cooking. Anything weirder than that is 'molecular gastronomy', and means you are cutting edge cuisine.

[zephyr-pie.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's good to hear from another color-blind person! I must say, however, that I have not noticed my vision to impair my cooking abilities. Actually, I rather like to cook and what I make usually tastes alright. Do not mistake me though, there have been other things that were much more difficult:

Making pre-stk zzt games when I couldn't tell the yellow and green apart
Going all through school mixing up blue and purple
Having nervous breakdowns when I had to use a set of crayons that didn't have the nice labels with the color names on them
Being an object of observation in my biology class, after they discovered my "disability."
Having to put up with innumerable idiots, asking, "What color is my shirt?! :D"

Were my experiences unique or do some of these stir up memories?

[davidn]

I always found ZZT's green/yellow/brown colours to be something of a problem, and the other most common mistake I make is blue/purple as well (my geography teacher just decided to stop mentioning my purple seas on maps).

I used to get the "What colour is x?" all the time as well. I find it mildly insulting - you wouldn't ask someone to try walking across a room after they've just told you that they're paralysed from the waist down.

Although last year, when one of the American students learned of my colourblindness, she said that she'd like to be colourblind because it was (and I quote) "kinda cool". Fascinating.

[zephyr-pie.livejournal.com]

Very fascinating - I can recall some people saying the exact same phrase to me.