9 months after my brain tumor surgery (and 6 months after I was released from critical condition) I was living on my own, in my own house, and I don't recommend it to anyone. I was college poor -- read: mortgage payments -- with expensive tastes (read: you're living again!!! Let's try fucking everything!!!) so I either had to learn to cook, or I had to get really creative with ramen... sometimes I did both. A few months into the disaster, a good friend of mine gave me a very used copy of "Kitchen Confidential." Then I learned about Chef Paul Bocuse. My redneck roots influenced my journalism major so I dug into French cuisine to find the extremes, then immediately applied those techniques to the BBQ traditions I grew up with. Rotisserie squirrel with rosemary and bourbon-soaked cherries was a fun one I don't recommend, but asparagus with garlic-infused butter, fresh lemon zest and bacon bits made my mouth water at 19 (I still make it weekly over a decade later). Though Bocuse has since died, and my friend recently killed himself with alcohol and pills, it's still a nice trick to make a quick hollandaise with the duck eggs from the yard. Or do brisket, with a clarified butter, tarragon, sage, thyme and white wine reduction. I was 19 trying to figure out how to make myself a basic dinner, and curiosity (and two dead people) taught me how to cook. And I eventually learned how, in a roundabout way. Focus: What skills or abilities did you learn in unconventional ways? And how? Alt. Focus: What do you want to learn how to do? Maybe TiB can help.
This entire post was a rollercoaster ride. Also, You dont say? Anywho, Focus: I learned how to do basic cooking because my mom's cooking is very much of her generation. I had lots of Shake N'Bake and Rice-a-Roni type shit growing up. So I learned to cook reasonably well by watching Youtube videos and just trial-and-error. I made a lot of terrible things before I got a basic understanding of how things should go together.
When I left the house to move to San Francisco I did not know how to do laundry. My first laundry loads resulted in a lot of pink shirts and other interesting colors on what were once white clothing. Kids, this was before the internet so there were no Youtube videos. I learned by asking the people next to me at a laundromat what to do. I also did not know how to even boil water, much less cook. My first real meals I would cook were a can of chili, Green Giant frozen vegetables and some frozen biscuits. I even managed to ruin that meal a time or two learning how to just heat up food. I learned through a Betty Crocker "How to cook Boys and Girls" book with lots of pictures showing what to do. I am not a good cook now, but at least I can feed myself. I make the twins cook certain meals cause no way do I want them to go through what I did.
Welcome to any skill in any field, whether it be cooking, software development, welding, driving, etc. Too many people give up way too fast because they weren't an expert on something on day 1. FOCUS: "Unconventional Ways" are not so unconventional any more. A large part of what I've been learning over the last few years are a direct result of YouTube videos and books. I think that is becoming more and more the norm. For me, the list of stuff I've been working on or learning that way includes: woodworking, cooking, electronics, software development, gardening, and welding. When I get interested in something, I tend to dive in with both feet and go for broke. When I got interested in high performance driving, I ended up buying a race car and eventually competed in the 24 hours of Daytona 4 times. I'm kind of diving into welding the same way, and am learning way, way more metallurgy than I thought I ever would. When I started into cooking, I ended up buying a ton of books and learning through them... like The Modernist Cuisine... absolutely mind blowing if you really want to learn the hard-core science behind cooking. I even keep current on my profession by watching hours of conferences that are put online with more and more frequency... 2 days after a big conference in Europe, the full presentations are on YouTube for free. It's been a game changer.
Hey I'll try that squirrel. It's all in the method, best steak I ever ate only cost me $2.50. FOCUS: Everything I know about PC troubleshooting is courtesy of playing Doom on an IBM Aptiva that wasn't built for it. We learned to edit autoexec.bat and turn off every system resource we didn't need just to free up the memory. It taught me that computers were not these mythical devices, but just machines that you could tinker with.