A New Mission

Since I have recently begun my foray into cooking (in the past year or so) I have really been enjoying it (for the most part). I am getting to that point where I want to be better at it. I always admire those people who can just whip crap up at the spur of the moment. While I realize that this does come from a lot of practice and a lot of failures and building up their knowledge base I believe that it also comes from a knowledge and understanding of the basics.
That I really don't have.
Everything I am going on now I picked up from books or from that 1/2 semester of cooking we did in Home Ec back in 8th grade (which I managed to remember a surprisingly large amount from that). What I did not get was any sort of "home" learning. Growing up my cooking consisted of microwaving something from the freezer or opening a can of soup. My parents weren't much better. It seemed like they had a repertoire of about 10-15 recipes that really didn't get rotated all that much (In fact my brother can still recite the rotation of dinners that we grew up with. About all I can remember was that Monday was spaghetti, Tuesday was either city chicken or Beef-A-Roni, and Sunday was leftover day.) I guess that would explain my current need for variety in my dinners. Don't get me wrong, I can eat macaroni and cheese everyday for a week for lunch and be fine but I do enjoy some variety in dinner.
In order to help with my goal of becoming a better cook I got a book that describes and walks me through all the steps of classical French cooking (who better to learn the basics from, right? Besides you can't effectively break the rules without knowing them first). Hopefully working through these "lessons" will improve my confidence and my skills in the kitchen.

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