On my last blog, I received a lot of feedback (https://michaelamerz.org/2024/01/26/anyone-can-cook/), “Everyone Can Cook.” From all the feedback, I gained the impression that I belong to an absolute minority of “people who don’t enjoy cooking.” Obviously, many people engage enthusiastically in the kitchen, letting their creativity flow, and cooking is relaxation and a balance to their workday for them. I listened attentively, and being blessed with high empathy, I could empathize.

Then, I had lunch with one of my clients, a tax chief of a company, and she also brought up my post about cooking. She said that the reasons I mentioned for never being invited to cook along as a child couldn’t be the true reason. She herself grew up with a single mother who had anorexia, and where cooking was almost nonexistent, yet she enjoys cooking, especially Asian cuisine.

I thought about it and dug up more cooking experiences from my deepest past. I have no idea how old I was, maybe at the beginning of puberty. My mother’s birthday was approaching. My mother loved cream rolls. I don’t remember how I came up with the idea to make them myself. I bought the necessary ingredients, prepared the dough, and then paused. A roll cannot be made without a metal rod to roll the dough onto. I knew my mother had never made any. I searched in boxes of Christmas cookie cutters, in the oven. No, metal rods for rolling dough wouldn’t be among my mother’s utensils. My plan was in danger of failing due to this triviality.

I’m a fighter and have been creative in solving problems since childhood. Until my mother came, there were still 3 hours left. Buying the molds somewhere in this time frame was out of the question. The second option, going from neighbor to neighbor, also promised little success. What could I use instead of the metal rods, I asked myself. And it occurred to me that my mother used metallic curlers for her hair. I searched for them and found them. They were a bit too short, and the diameter was larger than that of store-bought cream roll rods, and they even had holes. But they were metal and could serve the purpose.

I washed them first and then sterilized them in boiling water. Then I greased them very well. Then I wrapped the dough around the curlers and put them in the oven. Well, the end product looked good, but the challenge was: how do I get the metal curlers out of the finished pastries? 8 out of 10 that I baked were broken.

Another technique was needed. I wrapped the metal curlers in parchment paper, then I put the dough over the paper and into the oven. Success was again modest, with the difference that I had to painstakingly pull out the paper with tweezers from the 2 saved ones (the others broke) and I wasn’t sure if I had really removed everything.

There wasn’t enough ingredients left for further attempts.

I whipped the cream, filled the 4 saved rolls, and put them on the balcony. Now I had to clean up, clean the curlers, and prepare for Mother’s arrival.

Mother came, I wished her a happy birthday and said that I had baked something for her as a surprise. I went to the balcony and thought I was going to collapse. There were pigeons on our balcony. My plate was under a grille, but the pigeons had chosen to sit on this grille. 3 of the cream rolls were decorated with their unappetizing excrements. I was disappointed. I brought the plate into the living room and showed it to Mother. It was clear that no one would eat it.

Mother looked at it and said, “That looks good, too bad about the pigeons – next time, better in the fridge. But where did you get the molds? We don’t have any.”

I told my mother how I creatively used her hair curlers, and she got really angry. She snapped at me: “Never do that again.” After that, I threw everything away in a bucket, and I think I swore never to bake again in my life.

Perhaps the total failure was also a contributing factor to my aversion to cooking.