It always amazed me that someone could eat whole fish out of a can. Tuna at least is unrecognizable as fish once you pop that top off, but sardines are actual, whole fish! They’ve got eyes and tails and there are things going on there that maybe would be more fit for a cartoon alley cat to eat in one bite than a human being. But no, that guy loves tiny whole fish on bread with maybe some mayo. (We always were crazy about mayo.)

Although my dad’s a sardine man from way back, I’m more the anchovy type. Okay, I’m the anchovy type sometimes—like, whenever they’re not staring back at me. I love anchovies on pizza—for one slice at most. I love anchovies on my plate—provided I don’t see any little faces looking longingly up at me as if to say, “Why?” And I love anchovies in my Cesar salad dressing—except I’m really nervous about actually making some with them.

First of all, unlike the rest of my family, I’m not that into mayo, and a lot of the Cesar recipes I’ve found include the stuff in abundance. Mayonnaise is one of those edible things that actually makes me kind of uncomfortable. For some people that’s octopus, offal, or lamb fries. Mayo makes me uncomfortable because it’s kind of like an egg-and-vinegar Jell-O. If it were more like dressing maybe I wouldn’t be as freaked out, but no—it’s gotta be kind of…wiggly. I like wiggly in my Shakira, and I like wiggly in my plain nonfat yogurt. So I’ll stick to the yogurt substitution and hope for the best.

Second, I’m nervous because anchovies are a pretty divisive foodstuff—not unlike my old pal cilantro. If I misstep here, will the dressing end up being Fishytown, USA? But if I underutilize our little scaly heroes, it will just basically be a garlicky, lemony yogurt thing, which would be tragic.

Not only that, but what do I do with the inevitable rest of the anchovies? I don’t need an entire tin of anchovies; I’ll never eat them. Should I start daring people to eat them? Should I start looking up other anchovy-based recipes? What if my husband turns out not to like them—then it’s “So much for Plan B.”

And finally, how do I keep myself from eating all the croutons at once? I love croutons so very much.

We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it, I guess. For now, let’s make some Cesar salad, once again courtesy of Everyday Food: Great Food Fast.

Everything about this turned out better than expected: The croutons were absolutely the perfect croutons. Restaurant-quality croutons! And I made them from day-old French rolls bought out of the bread case at my local supermarket! Amazing. I grilled some chicken on the George Foreman (my default chicken-cooking situation), washed/dried and ribbon-cut lettuce and threw it all together. It was awesome! Hooray tiny fish in a pull-back-top tin can!

The Nervous Cook is no longer nervous about: making Cesar dressing from scratch! And also tossing anchovies in the blender with lemon juice and yogurt! Delish.

PS: Did you know that the Cesar salad was actually invented by a chef in Tijuana? I think that’s muy interesante.

PPS: I threw the rest of the anchovies out. I’m sorry! I know it’s not very sustainable, but what the hell was I going to do with ten more anchovy fillets?!

PPPS: Now I feel really bad about the anchovies.

Cilantro is the Nadal to my Federer. It’s the thorn on the rose of every amazing Mexican, Indian and Vietnamese meal I’ve ever eaten. It’s caused me to be even more of a cautious eater than I am a nervous cook. I’ve picked it off of tacos, eaten around it in noodle bowls, and scraped it off sandwiches. I’ve asked timidly if it were included in a dish, then even more timidly asked if it could be left off. And certainly, whenever possible, I’ve lived my life completely avoiding certain menu items I was just sure would have tons of the stuff. Anything with a spicy-sounding name and most things that have a proliferation of chilled tomatoes. You know, like pico de gallo, corn salad, gazpacho…

Wait…what? No, you’re kidding. You’re serious?!

I can’t believe nobody ever told met gazpacho doesn’t have to have cilantro in it! What kind of friends are you? All this time I could have been eating cool, refreshing tomato soup, maybe with a little kick to it, maybe with some grilled bread or fresh shrimp, but no—instead I’ve been scrunching up my nose at the thought of a perfect summer evening ruined by a mouthful of my arch nemesis herb.

Well, who cares what kind of friends you are, because I have Martha Stewart, and Martha Stewart always looks out for a dame. All it took was a quick flip through Everyday Food: Great Food Fast, and boom! Cilantro-free gazpacho that takes a whole of 25 minutes to whip up. I’m ’bout to make up for some lost time, son.

1 tbs olive oil coarse salt black pepper 1 pint grape tomatoes, chopped 2 garlic cloves, chopped 1/2 small red onion, chopped 1/2 cucumber, peeled & chopped 1/2 cup roasted red pepp, chopped 1.5 cups tomato juice 2 tbs red-wine vinegar

In a food processor, combine the tomatoes, onion, garlic, cucumber and half the roasted peppers and mix until combined. Add tomato juice and vinegar and mix until smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve chilled or at room temperature with the remaining red peppers on top.

While the original recipe calls for plum tomatoes, my grocer didn’t have any, so I tossed in a pint of cherry maters instead. It lightened up the color pretty considerably, but the texture and taste are still fantastic. I might like the resulting soup to be a little spicier, though, so I’d likely toss some diced jalapeños into the mix next time. But other than that, I have got—on a blistering 90° New York City day, a cup of everything I’ve ever wanted and none of that little green monster.

The Nervous Cook is no longer nervous about: gazpacho! ¡Ay, dios mio!

“What’s that, Idea?” I asked.

“Applesauce baked into a bread-like treat!”

Well hot-diggity dog, the ol’ gal was right. I set right off on a mission to bake an applesauce loaf…though that basically meant starting from the ground up, seeing as I didn’t have any: baking soda, baking powder, sugar, eggs, cinnamon or a loaf pan. But I was determined, nothing was going to stop me! The two cornerstones of my diet, apples and bread—together at last!

I set out to follow the simplest recipe I could find (which of course I can’t re-find now to link):

2 cups whole wheat flour 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce 1.5 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp baking soda 1 cup sugar 4 egg whites 3 mashed bananas 1 tbs vanilla extract 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 325°. In a blender, mash the bananas. Add to the sugar, mix well and let sit for 15 minutes. Add the applesauce and egg whites; mix well. Add remaining ingredients and mix till as smooth as possible. Pour into a greased 9″ x 5″ loaf pan. Bake 1 hour or until toothpick test says otherwise. Take ‘er out of the oven, let stand 10 minutes and transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Now this was all kind of a leap of faith for me in the first place. I don’t bake very often, and I haven’t since I was vegan and the only pleasure I got out of life was eating things like egg-free cookies and bag upon bag of potato chips. Not only don’t I bake often, but when I’m do I’m a super nervous baker—the type that peeks into the oven every five minutes to see if anything’s burning, bubbling over or stinking to high heaven. Surely I could handle a recipe with fewer than 10 ingredients, though, right?

We started out with a bang. The bananas mashed to the perfect mush, the flour mixed in evenly and smoothly, and even my sorry excuse for a “medium mixing bowl,” which is actually just an oversize salad bowl, was up to the task. With the loaf set and ready, I popped it in the ov and settled in for an hour’s worth of hitting “refresh” on Facebook. Everything was going great.

Everything, that is, until I went to check its doneness. That’s when disaster struck.

See, there are a couple things working against me here in the shoebox where the oven is: (1) I don’t own a decent pair of oven mitts, and (2) the kitchen is actually so small that it can’t accommodate both one nervous cook and one open appliance door at the same time. That means that in order to check on the loaf, I have to kind of shimmy backward, half out of the kitchen, hunched over the open door and reaching in for the pan with two dish towels loosely draped over my paws.

Well, I got it out okay, checked it with a toothpick and discovered it wasn’t ready. That part was easy. But when I went to put it back into the oven, it slipped. No, it didn’t just slip, it leaped. It leaped like Thelma and Louise in the front seat of a teal 1966 Thunderbird convertible, right over the side of a cliff. It slipped, rolled, and flipped clear out of the pan—upside down!—onto the rack in the oven.

I have never, ever cried about losing a single piece of food, but oh my friends, I cried when that loaf went down. I cried hard. I cried for the $30 in wasted ingredients (including a loaf pan I might now be too traumatized to ever use again). I cried for an hour’s worth of wasted prepping, mixing and salivating over the delicious smells coming out of that treacherous oven. I cried because I am a natural crier; waterworks at the drop of a hat.

But then…

“Wait a second… I can still— I mean, I’ll just finish baking it, right? Didn’t Julia Child say it’s totally okay to drop the hell out of something and just plop it back into the heat? (Apparently not, but whatever.) Well that’s what I’m going to do, for Pete’s sake, and ain’t nobody here going to stop me.”

And that’s what happened. So what if it’s misshapen and unevenly cooked? So what if I then spent 45 minutes scraping burned applesauce-batter sludge off the bottom of the oven? A slice of this stuff, a schmear of peanut butter and we are golden. To hell with your conventions of beauty in baked goods! We’re lumpy and proud, damnit!

The Nervous Cook is no longer nervous about: the five-second rule.

However, like most things in life, it always tasted awesome simply because someone else was inevitably making it: mom for a quick Saturday lunch; a baby-sitter who needed something easy to whip up so as to not detract any time from her talking to her boyfriend on our telephone; dad for dinner because his cooking repertoire comprises just meatloaf and tuna salad, and we all knew how terrible his meatloaf was. I have always and will always love food prepared by someone else. It tastes 300% sweeter. Or fishier, as the case may be.

Early in my adulthood, I occasionally gave making tuna salad a go on my own, but it always managed to completely disappoint. How, I have often asked myself, can a g-ddamned three-ingredient canned-fish salad not at least turn out moderately well enough to eat?! This is one of the things that led me to believe pretty early on that the cooking arts were not for me.

But then I started reading cookbooks like novels.

The new-to-me cookbook I was telling you about, which often gets criticized for being too simple, turned out right out of the gate to be like a lost chapter in the Old Testament to me. Hallelujah.

Seriously, though: tuna salad with yogurt and mustard?!?

While I bet that to other beginner cooks the thought of making tuna salad with something—anything—but mayonnaise is probably pretty banal, but to me, this is a complete revelation! A 180&deg turn, an a-ha moment, a “Suddenly lunch is so much more approachable” epiphany!

But wait! There’s more! There can be vegetables involved! Real vegetables, not just a texture filler like celery (which my husband hates, by the way)! Cucumbers and peppers and onions and even Kalamata olives, which are not strictly speaking a vegetable!

2 tbs nonfat plain yogurt 1 tbs Dijon mustard 1 tbs lemon juice 3.75oz canned tuna 1/2 cup diced celery 1/4 cup diced cukes 1/4 cup diced red pepp 1 tbs finely diced red onion 3 pitted, quartered Kalamatas

In a medium mixing bowl, stir together yogurt, mustard and lemon juice. Drain tuna, add to the bowl with the dressing. Stir in the rest. Bing, bang, boom. Serve.

And so, my friends, the end of our long national nightmare is over. Tuna salad can be enjoyable again—even when I have to make it myself.

The Nervous Cook is no longer nervous about: trying to do one better on things she used to love as a kid. And also, eating the same thing for lunch three days in a row, as I just did because I made so much of this out of sheer excitement. Freedom from mayonnaise! Do you hear the people sing? It is the music of a people who will not eat mayo again!

That is all to say that yes, I’m the type that reads cookbooks cover to cover. You know, just to get a feel for the thing before diving in.

I mean, I read everything in a cookbook: editor’s notes, dedications, nutritional information, sidebars, substitutions, the whole kit and caboodle. You’d be surprised how much you learn about a cookbook author by reading his or her work as though it were a novel. Although, I guess a novel isn’t the right comparison — autobiography is more like it.

My latest used-cookbook purchase is Healthy Cooking for Two (Or Just You), by Frances Price, R.D. I picked it up for $13 at Powell’s Book Store in Portland, Oregon, this weekend, and it was fully dog-eared by the time our plane landed in New York’s La Guardia airport. I now know that the author once owned a successful restaurant in Virginia, that she is twice divorced, that two of her daughters are vegetarian and that she’s not above “borrowing” other folks’ recipes, trimming some of the fat and turning them around for waist-watchers like me (I know, eye roll).

I also learned that there is a typo on page 1, that Baltimore has had farmers markets since 1751 and that I am really excited to finally be able to cook based on an exact recipe, rather than halving the usual “Serves 4″ situation.

Stay tuned for more nervous misadventures with a new-to-me cookbook…

(1) Wait a while after turning the stove off to place your (plastic) cutting board upon it.

(2) What you can’t tell here is that the board is also concave, which means that it rocks when I chop things on it, and occasionally things roll of of it for this same reason.

(3) It is okay to buy a new cutting board. I should do this.

We’ve had this cutting board for a year. It has been in this sad state for six months. Every time I use it, which is 5–6 days a week, I think: Tomorrow you are going to march yourself down to a store and buy a new cutting board. And then the next day, without fail, I think myself out of it: I mean, it’s not so bad. I just have to stop putting things that can roll on it.

Maybe tomorrow…

Except I don’t really understand the “wilting” thing. First of all, why wilting? Isn’t wilting a bad thing? I expect wilting to be what happens to any house plant I’ve ever been given as a gift. Also, and more importantly, I need more specific directions than “Stir in spinach until wilted.”

I mean, you dump the spinach in there looking like this, but for all I know, “wilted” just means that it’ll be done when it starts looking like Elizabeth Taylor after she’s been under the lights for too long, mascara runny and hair deflated.

How wilted is too wilted?!

The other problem is when to add the spinach in order to both wilt it to this ambiguous level of doneness while maintaining a nonmushy pot of orzo. Adding the greens too soon or too late might create a situation calling for the sacrifice of one or the other: Underwilted spin or overcooked orz? I don’t know if I’m prepared to make that choice. How do you choose among your children, your babies?

Turned out it didn’t come to that. Turned out, in fact, that wilting’s pretty easy: When the pasta’s done and the leaves are shrunken and dark green, she’s done. Wilt your way into my belly, little friend!

Here’s what I think, though: All recipes should come with Pantone colors that match the degree of doneness of the individual items. And if we could figure out a way to somehow indicate the exact level of al dente my husband likes in his pasta, while we’re at it, I’d be eternally grateful.

When I was growing up, my siblings and I had a joke with our mother about her lack of kitchen-multitasking skills—primarily anything that had to do with what is mathematically known as

(heat + food) X phone call = burnt everything

but where “phone call” could also be “painting her nails” or “cutting coupons.” Well, I have discovered the hard way that the unitasking gene is dominant in my family, and that so much as a whisper of interference can throw me off my culinary game, as it were.

Enter tonight, enter a phone call from my sister while I prepare to roast Brussels sprouts, toast buns, slice cucumbers and preheat the George Foreman grill (see also: a forthcoming entry about ol’ Grillin’ George) to cook lemon-pepper chicken burgers.

COMMENCE NERVOUSNESS: “Oh, hi! No, nothing, just getting dinner ready. No, it’s okay, I can talk.” Wait, I can’t reach the colander. Hold on, I can climb up on this chair… Where’s the baking sheet? Oh crap, it’s already in the oven, and now it’s 450 degrees in there—ow! Dang it! “What? Oh, really? Wow, that’s terrible.” Can she tell that my survival instinct has kicked in here and I had to sort of stop paying attention to what she’s saying five minutes ago? Did I really just burn my knuckle for the second time tonight trying to flip these sprouts? Ow! Damnit, I am just trying to toast this stupid bun! How many times can one person burn—ow! “Hmm? No, no I’m not busy at all. Just in the kitchen, you know. What were you saying?”

All things considered, I was glad to have been able to talk to my sister, who I pray couldn’t tell that I was systematically burning off all of the hair on my right arm while trying to cradle my cell phone between shoulder and ear as I was shaking the baking sheet for an even roast. The sprouts (my husband’s favorite vegetable) were well-done, as we both like them, and assembling the burger parts one-handedly (buns, mustard, lettuce, cucumber, onion) was much easier than trying to navigate mid-level heat with one ear on the phone and one on the sizzling of the patties. Is that a minor victory for the Nervous Cook over genetics?

The Nervous Cook is no longer nervous about: being able to see a meal through, start to finish, while simultaneously conducting an incredibly distracted phone conversation and sustaining first- and second-degree burns on her hand.

This occasionally leads to overthinking how long it will take me to make a particular dish, which can lead to a bit of a timing fiasco. Sometimes I finish way too early, sometimes I’m left starving watching a main course “simmer, covered, until tender.” Arrgh, simmer this!! I’m hungry! Arrgh!!

The issue was compounded tonight by the fact that I was killing that time by both watching the Food Network (I love Paula Deen so much) and reading Food Network Magazine, which I just got as a reward from my bank for… spending so much money on food, I guess?

Add brown rice to this situation, and you’ve got a timing free-for-all. Seriously, 45–50 minute simmer time? Screws me up every single time! And I still have not mastered the art of the perfect brown rice. I feel like I’ve read everything there is to read about how to get brown rice right every time, and I still manage to make mine mediocre. It’s like I’m looking for the Holy Grail of rice-cooking instructions.

Tonight, thought, I came really close to perfect brown rice. I think it might be because I replaced some of the water with low-sodium chicken stock and stirred a little “butter” into it once it was done cooking. Moist, salty goodness!

One thing I did not come close to, however, was nailing the timing.

My husband, an old-movie buff, was to be out at a double feature that ended at 8:45, so I was shooting for a plating time of 9pm… but was done cooking at 8:35, largely due to the fact that in my anxiety about having everything ready in time I insist on meticulously chopping, opening, washing and setting aside every single ingredient—which then only tempts me to start tossing them in the pan wicked early. Which then means at least 25 minutes after finishing spent fretting about veggies drying out and rice cooling down and serving my (probably rain-soaked) groom a withered, lukewarm dinner.

But honestly, everything actually went perfectly: The extra time spent sitting in a pan—not cooking, but being kept warm—gave the eggplant involved that extra little push toward juicy, rather than the kind of odd starchy dryness eggplant can have. And the near-perfect rice remained near-perfect even though it sat around a little bit.

Seriously, I can’t stress enough how excited I was to have accidentally made such good rice.

Since I actually winged this one using stuff I had in the fridge and cupboard, I’ll share it with you here:

1 tbs olive oil 1 tbs hoisin sauce 2 minced garlic cloves 1 pckg preseasoned tofu 1 chopped red pepper 2 carrots, chopped into coins 1 chopped yellow onion 1/2 eggplant, 1″ pieces 1/2 tomato, 1″ pieces 1 can baby corn, drained 1 can water chestnuts, drained 1/4 cup raw cashews salt & pepp

Heat oil in a large skillet over med-high heat. Add garlic and onions; cook until tender (about 5 minutes). Season with salt & pepp; add eggplant and tomato. Cook until tomato starts releasing juicy goodness (about 5 minutes) and add hoisin sauce. Add red pepper, carrots, corn and water chestnuts; cook until carrots start to get tender (7–9 minutes) and then add tofu and cashews. Cover and let cook through, checking occasionally to make sure nothing’s getting irreparably stuck to the pan (10 minutes or so?). Serve over some miraculous brown rice.

(I went with ready-seasoned tofu because I’m an utter failure at regular tofu. I think that’s something that we will one day approach together, you and I. If you have any tips, send ‘em my way, dear friends.)

THE HUSBAND RESPONDS: “It was delicious! I didn’t know it was done so early. I had no idea.”

Whatta guy, am I right?