Cooking

Cooking is an art form. It is one of those activities that should only be attempted by those who know how to do it and like to eat; if you don't like to eat you have no business next to a stove. I am one of those who considers that eating is a sensual pleasure in its most unrated form, and cooking while having a glass of wine and listening to good music the ultimate selfish experience.
Now, I've discovered that there are days though that even those who enjoy cooking should not attempt it. I'm having one of those days. It all started with my inability to identify the piece of meat my husband took out of the freezer. Pork, lamb or beef? It turned out to be breast of veal, which it seems appeared in the freezer by some miracle since neither of us recalls buying it. I never buy veal, nothing against those cute animals, but the meat has no taste. You have to season it to no end so that it can absorb the other flavors having none to call its own. And so once the "piece de resistance" identified I went on scouting around the kitchen to find what would ideally complement it. Potatoes, onions and garlic seemed like a sure bet. I decided that a good way of enhancing the breast of veal was to cover one of its sides with coarse salt. Once the onions were sizzling in the olive oil I put the veal with herbs and garlic in the middle of the pot, I proceed to salt it and pepper it. Bad idea if you're having one of those days. I completely forgot about the coarse salt and on top of it, instead of just sparingly put some salt, a whole spoonful comes out of the shaker. How bad could it be? I leave it cooking for a bit, taste the juice and realize that unless I want to send both my husband and I straight to the hospital with a heart attack I better rinse the whole thing out. So much for absorbing any kind of flavor. And so the whole thing properly 'de-salted" I start from scratch. As I write this we have a piece of originally unidentified meat cooking with some potatoes.The music is playing and the glass of wine (or beer in this instance) is present, but as for the result of tonight's culinary adventure, we should have stuck to delivery, not even scrambled eggs would have escaped from my stay-away-from-the-kitchen day.