Lessons in Cooking: Turmeric and Black Pepper Chicken with Asparagus

Oh yes, you read that right. Not baking, cooking.

Cooking terrifies me. I am not a chef. Even when I went to college and those of us who never really cooked before needed to start trying our hand at it, I decided to invest in baking and sustain myself through bagels and cup of noodles instead.

Only very, very, recently have I started to really try my hand at cooking. As a matter of fact, a few months ago we decided I would try to cook dinner one night a week (yes, AJ cooks 99.9999% of the time otherwise) and I probably should have been documenting this awhile ago when I started because I really jumped in and went for it. I think my first dish was a lemon parmesan chicken with artichoke hearts and I even went full-scale homemade Russian pirogies too. Then there was Mexican pozole and a chicken and an Asian broccoli and chicken stir fry and a lentil stew.

So far I've learned it's a lot easier than I thought in many ways, but also just as hard as I expected in other ways, although the only way to get better is to practice. Like, what's easier is often the taste. It's not too hard to make something taste even slightly better than plain (hello random spices and marinades) but it does take attention to detail to cook things the right amount, but it still is harder than you'd think to truly ruin something and made it inedible (not that that's not possible).

I get a free subscription to the New York Times through work so I also get to take advantage of their Cooking section (which is actually pretty darn awesome) and I get some great ideas from there and anyone can cook following a recipe. We realized I had fallen off of the cooking train so I started up again and this week I made turmeric and black pepper chicken with asparagus. It was simple and quick and pretty tasty (it's amazing how little effort it took and how sometimes you need the inspiration to think about combining certain ingredients sometime). I did try to cook too much chicken and asparagus at once though so it took a little longer to cook thoroughly, and I probably could've increased the turmeric and black pepper but it was all cooked a nice amount and it's also honeyed so it's sweet and a nice change of pace. It also would've went perfect over some rice if only I had thought about that sooner.

I'm still very intimidated by cooking, but I'm getting used to it.