It's your lifelong dream, but how do you go about it?
Well... let's just talk about that.
First, you need to learn how to boil water. Yeah, you wouldn't think that would be such a big deal, but, evidently, it is. I mean, my brother can't boil water to the extent that my mother banned him from trying to cook anything that didn't involve the microwave oven. I suppose he just burned up too many of her pots. I'm not talking about when he was a kid, either. This was when he was a full grown adult. Seriously, if he had gone to college, he would have starved from lack of being able to make ramen noodle soup.
Boiling water, though, is a basic skill of cooking. After that, boiling eggs. I think I was about nine or so when I started doing the boiled egg thing. I got a recipe for making deviled eggs off of some TV show (I sort of think it was The Electric Company, but I don't remember for sure), and I was really into doing that for a while. I'd make them for my brother (who was about three at the time) and me after school or on Saturdays or, basically, whenever I wanted to, and I was competent enough that my mom let me do it whenever I wanted without any supervision.
Everything I've learned since then, I've learned just from doing it, and, I have to say, I'm a good cooker. That's how I like to say it, "I'm the cooker in the family." The thing is, though, you can get a recipe for anything online. And I mean anything. You want the top secret recipe to make fried chicken just like KFC? It's online. You want the special chocolate sauce recipe from Outback? It's online. You want to make your great grandmother's squirrel dumplings (and squirrel is big in England and France, right now), I'm sure you can find it online. Or, you know, something that's so close you can't tell the difference.
The thing is, if you really want to be a chef, the best way to go about it is to practice cooking. A lot. Constantly try out new recipes and expand what you can do and make. Sure, you can go to school for it; you can even get a degree in it, but, when it comes down to it, when it actually comes time to get a job in a restaurant, that degree is not as helpful as it may seem, because most restaurants still use an apprenticeship system for their chefs, so, no matter how good you are or what kind of degree you have, you're going to get hired at the bottom and have to work your way up. From that standpoint, the guy that's been a cook at Applebee's for five years is going to have just the same kind of chance as someone fresh out of culinary school. The main thing is to do it.
IWSG:
Living Between the Spikes
Being Wednesday, it's also IWSG day.
Sometimes, it can be hard to live between the spikes. The problem, if there is a problem, is that there are spikes. With, well, everything. Personally, I'd prefer a nice smooth incline. Just a gradual trip up the slope without any dips, but that's not how it works. Knowing this doesn't help. I mean, I know that the spikes don't matter as long as there is an overall increase, BUT...
But I'm not really talking about the blog here, even if that is a graph of my blog traffic. No, what I'm talking about is "book traffic." As I mentioned here, the release of "The Tree of Light" was my best release so far.
So another dip... and, even though everything is tending upward, the dips are... well, they're dips. When what you really want is for everything to just keep going up and up and up, the dips are kind of a bummer. But, if the stock market is any example (and I'm not saying it is), the dips are good. You don't want anything to just keep going up and up and up until it breaks. The dips, I'm sure, are healthy, but, man, it sure is difficult to climb back up the other side!
