Cooking For The First Time

Image found Safefood.

By: Brayden Dodson

I’m a boy, I live in a household where my mom is cooking and my dad works. But for my own family, I want to know how to cook so that my wife doesn’t have to deal with the hassle of cooking while I sit in the living room watching TV and drinking beer.

For this project, because  I have dyslexia, therefore cookbooks add an extra level of difficulty to the project. So instead, I turned to the expert: my mom. I’ve seen her make this meal ever since I was five, and I know from experience that it is delicious food. So it only made sense that now I would learn how to be the creator of such a fine dish.

In America cooking is usually a skill that mostly women have, as culture and social norms have it so the females are usually the ones that stay home and cook for family or a relationship. As of 2025 these roles are quickly changing for the better as men like Gordan Ramsey and others have made it so cooking is a appleing and masculine activity for males to try or even pursue. So as a 17 year old boy with little to no cooking experience at all, I wanted to try and cook a meal for my family. I’ll be making sausage and pasta which is a fairly simple dish with a side of salad.

To start cooking you need the right things to make the dish, from my mom’s instructions I grabbed a cutting board, a big teal pan, and then the biggest pot we had to feed my 5 person family. 

“Get the onions” my mother said,

I looked around for a second and then I saw a big white onion and placed it onto the cutting board. My mother grabbed a knife and began sharpening it–the blade making a weird squeaking noise as it got sharpened. While my mom was sharpening the knife, I took the big pot and filled it with water then put it on the burner to boil.

“Add a glug of olive oil”, my mom said,

I took the weirdly slippery olive oil bottle and quickly put a glug of olive oil into the water as the water began to bubble ever so slightly. I grabbed the bow-tie pasta out from the cupboard and poured them into the boiling water.

“Grab the sausages out of the fridge” My mom said,

Slowly I walked over to the fridge and looked for the sausages, As I found the sausages and put them next to the cutting board.  My mom opened the package of 4 sausages and laid them onto the cutting board, then she handed me the knife and told me to slice them into little chunks. I began slicing then not even a second after the first slice. My mom shouted “Too big!" Frantically I started trying to focus on slicing the sausages into smaller chunks. Once I finish cutting sausages we slide them into the teal pan with a little olive oil and squeezed garlic–also some other spices that I can’t remember. 

While the sausages were cooking we started with the onions, I grabbed the onion and cut off the ends like what my mother instructed. Then she told me to peel the skin off the onion, as she said that I was instantly confused as I didn’t know you had to peel the skin off. My mom showed me by taking the first layer, peeling it off like a band-aid, the smell that the onion gave off smelled like a boys locker room after a long 90-minute soccer game. Onions were peeled and sliced into little chunks and slid into the teal pan with the sausages. 

While the sausages and onions were cooking we began with the salad by cutting up some lettuce, starting with the head and stem cutting them up into little chunks and then washing them chunks.  When I finished I had to put the lettuce into a salad spinner, which I’ve never seen my mom use a salad spinner before in my life. 

“Let’s start with the tomatoes while the lettuce is drying” My mom said, 

I personally hate tomatoes, so I wasn’t looking forward to making a salad that had tomatoes in it. So when my mom said to start with the tomatoes I within an instant regretted doing this story.

“Hold the tomato horizontally and just slide through with the knife”, My mom said,

 The way my mom just sliced a tomato in half in a millisecond made the inner competitor come out in me, I grabbed the knife and with confidence– then I cut my thumb open. My mom Immediately said “You're done” and took the knife away as I began walking to the bathroom to clean my battle wound. As I washed my cut I felt proud that I got that far, I was really expecting to mess up every step.

A couple of minutes later I came back from the bathroom and saw the food waiting on the table. I was nervous to actually eat it as my mom didn’t make it, so I ate the meal how I would if I was a three year old eating broccoli. It tasted normal but something was missing. I didn’t feel a certain thing that I usually feel when I eat my moms food–love. 

I've definitely learned a lot from this. I'm going to cook again, something more difficult, I want to actually put something in a pot and let it simmer - I want to make soup, number one on my list. Mom’s potato soup! Maybe one day I’ll learn that final secret ingredient- love!