Simply Another Pedant

I found this fabulous book in the library. It is titled The Pedant In The Kitchen by Julian Barnes. I feel like his attitude toward cooking reflects mine exactly, including the dogmatic following of recipes, complete lack of truly creative cooking power, and just plain cursing in the damn kitchen when things go wrong. Here's an exciting excerpt:

Consider: you start with 2 tablespoons of oil, plus butter; you have added a glass of wine; there is the fat from the chops and the juice from the chicory. What do you get after fifteen minutes on a low heat with the lid on? You get about half a pint of something looking like pale veal stock. You're not told to reduce it; yet Nigel's third picture, on forensic examination, reveals the black splatter of heavy reduction.

I set the chops aside, left the chicory in the pan, and boiled the shit out of it. Thus did this 'thirty-minute supper' become a forty-minute one. From time to time, I would scrape at the squeak-clean bottom of the pan with a wooden spatula, growling 'Goeey bits, gooey bits' in a tone some might judge filled with wise yet fierce irony and others might find barking mad. Eventually the dish was deilvered to the table. and the following lessons were absorbed..