I feel cursed. I am looking around my apartment for evil-looking amulets. I am examining my recent actions for bad karma generation. But I am stumped as to why my pots are scorching, my cookies are cakey, and my meat sauce is mushy. (OK, yes, there is one obvious recent choice of mine I won’t go into, but it has also generated a lot of positive vibes, so I’m just trusting that’s not a factor.)

Could it be that I’m just plain out of practice?

The honest truth is that I–maniacal proponent of home cooking as a life-saving, ennobling activity; eager spreader of the gospel of weekly meal-planning; and advocate for the simple satisfaction of humble meals and pantry staples–have barely lifted a finger in the kitchen for many months now. Excuses: lots of travel, lots of good friends who cook huge meals with leftovers, lots of new restaurants to try, lots of dismaying dishes in the sink… But really, when I think about it, I can’t remember when I last made a plain ol’ weeknight meal that wasn’t an omelette.

So there I was, shaking cinnamon into the Greek meat sauce and worrying that I was adding too much (of course I wasn’t–so it turned out bland). And there I was, dumping way too much chicken stock into a tomato soup…bland again. And there I was, trusting a bean recipe some Turkish guy wrote on a napkin for me two years ago, never imagining that of course those beans would need to be pre-soaked.

It is interesting to see what does go wrong when I’ve been out of the game: I’m too cautious with seasoning, I don’t trust the sounds and smells of something cooking and have to hover over it all the time, and I certainly can’t manage a knife very suavely. I have to fish around inside (or outside, in books) for information, instead of just going with my instincts–I feel slightly brain damaged, because I’m conscious of how hard I’m thinking. It all slows me waaaay down, and I get agitated and make even more stupid mistakes (let’s not even get into the failure to use measuring spoons while baking, and the Bechamel Falls I inadvertently created through faulty fiddling with the casserole dish).

But it’s useful to feel this way again, because I forget what it’s like to not quite know your way around a kitchen. Which is not meant to sound condescending (you poor, unenlightened savages, just waiting to see the light in a well-honed knife!)–more like a reminder to myself how much I have learned, and how cooking is a skill that takes practice.

Damn. Practicing has always been the thing I hated and blew off and eventually structured my life to avoid. Hence my no-flute-playing, bad-foreign-language-speaking, crappy-dancing, yoga-hating self. So I’m not an innate culinary genius (that’s what I’m waiting for–to discover my one perfect talent). But I guess cooking is the closest thing to painless practice–ya gotta eat, right?

But now I’m off to the Kabab Cafe. Tomorrow I’ll make dinner. And it’ll be damn good, I swear.