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I feel horribly ashamed, but…this is a YouTube video.

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I've finally seemed to conquer my psychological barriers…in the realm of cooking.

I still don't cook nearly as much as I should (for my wallet's sake), but at least I can do it at need. It no longer feels like a great, dramatic thing. I can look in the freezer and go Oh, I should cook that pork chop and on the way home that afternoon pick up some potatoes for roasting and manage something fairly tasty; I can harbour a thought like Sautéed onions and mushrooms would go well with this and not regard it as a big deal. And if I think afterwards that I should have sliced the onions a little thinner and maybe I should try a different kind of onions next time—well, it was still pretty good and it's not a disaster. Every cooking error used to be a disaster with me…

Today, then, was a grilled pork chop with oven-roasted potatoes, sautéed onions and mushrooms, and steamed asparagus heads. Other recent cooking adventures have included marinated steaks (and I don't need a recipe; all I did was take some soy sauce and some honey and press some garlic and mix it up and damn it turned out good, yet it's so simple!), fish chowder (tried that twice; mediocre the first time, decent the second, next time…hopefully good), and impromptu pasta sauce.

I also seem to develop in the direction of my father, who was a cooking virtuoso who could glance at a recipe, gain some inspiration from it, then without consulting it further (let alone following it) whip something up and have it end up delicious—at least in that I seem loath to closely follow recipes. I'm hardly a virtuoso and I would be lying through my teeth if I said it always turns out delicious, but hopefully that will come with experience…