Written by Wendy Tien
March 19, 2011
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I started cooking in 1989, my last summer in college. After three years of living without more than an underpowered microwave and a toaster oven with faulty wiring, I moved into a studio apartment in Madison with a range.
The kitchen experiments of that summer were disastrous, for the most part. I poured cooking wine liberally, and encased everything in frozen puff pastry. Nights when I cooked meat usually ended with the smoke alarm tweeting and me waving a broom over the ceiling while the smell of smoking grease and charred steak wafted out the open windows. But things improved over the next few years. A year after graduating from law school, burned out and full of doubt about practicing law, I bought a copy of the CIA’s text, The New Professional Chef, and decided to start cooking my way through the techniques, thinking that I might change careers
