Five years ago my life underwent a drastic change that divided it into two distinct periods — BC and AD.

BC stands for Before Cooking.

AD stands for Aristocratic Dining.

The BC label is objective — I really didn’t cook five-plus years ago. On the other hand, the AD label is, to put it mildly, subjective. First, my cooking is hardly fit for a king. Then again, why would I want it to be? Just because they were royals doesn’t mean their diets were even remotely sensible. In fact, from what I know of kings, sultans, beys, pharaohs, emirs, shahs, rajas and the rest, I’ll take a pass on their dining habits. And I’m not saying this due to any anti-royalist sentiments or reverse snobbery, but out of sheer survival instinct: If I’d spent my early years eating like a king (Farouk, for example, who in addition to his regular fare, ate 600 oysters a week) I doubt I would’ve hit the Big Four-O with an unclogged artery to my name — if I would’ve hit the Big Four-O at all.

So if I never cooked for 70 years, How did I survive?

Did I live on a diet of take-out, drive thru and frozen pizzas?

Did I drink Ensure six times a day?

Did I discover the secret of the Breatharians?

A big Nyet to all three.

Instead, I survived on what I fondly call Desperate Bachelor Cuisine.

And what, pray tell, is DBC?

Well, I can’t speak for all the other DB’s on God’s green earth, but in my case it was a diet that was neither intriguing nor even interesting. Matter of fact, most folks would consider it deadly dull. But it was healthy.

It was also simple and fast to prepare, since the only things I actually cooked were pasta and omelets. And since I don’t eat meat, that entire food group and its preparation never even entered my mind, let alone my gaping maw.

So if I didn’t eat meat and I didn’t cook, what did I eat?

Well, rather than “eat,” a more appropriate word might be graze or browse. I ate lots of fruits, veggies, whole grains (Grape Nuts were my daily breakfast, as well as occasional lunch and dinner). I ate salads up the waz, and my main source of protein was cheese of every imaginable variety (except Limburger, Gorgonzola and Velveeta).

But that all changed a short while after Jen-Ex and I started hanging out, due to a combination of altruism and self-interest.

If my diet was fairly labeled Desperate Bachelor Cuisine, hers could’ve been called Really Desperate Bachelorette Cuisine. She was one-up on me in the cooking department, since in addition to pasta, she made rice and beans. But aside from that, I think my gustatory skills topped hers, because she could (and did) eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread at least a couple times a day.

My altruism came into play because Jen-Ex works and I don’t. As a result, aside from weekends, the only times we could get together were in the evening. And I figured after a day at the salt mines she deserved a home-cooked meal.

My selfishness made it a sure thing I was not going to eat PB&J on white, five days a week.

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Caught in the net

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Deciding I was going to learn how to cook was easy. But figuring out how to do it was intimidating, since I had no idea where or how to begin. But I knew full well the longer I agonized over the whole shtick, the longer I’d continue to do nothing, until learning how to cook would be as far in my past as riding a unicycle or harnessing my latent powers of clairvoyance. So I just jumped right in with both feet … or, more exactly, with all 10 fingertips, as I hit up the internet.

As Brother Clark says, if you want to learn how to do anything, the place to start is the internet. Yeah, sure, a lot of the internet is a cyber-cesspool, which runs the gamut from the merely tasteless and insalubrious to the super-prurient and uber-perverted, and from the misinformed to the droolingly moronic. But since the internet is an open forum, those are just inevitable.

But if you want access to valuable information, it’s also there. And when it comes to recipes, the net is an electronic gold mine.

I don’t remember what recipes I first looked up. Maybe vegetarian chile sin carne, or rice noodles and fried tofu, or vegetable soup. Or maybe it was something else. But what I do remember is this: I found out ooking is easy, so easy that any Dope, even this one, can do it.

OK, when I say “cooking,” I clearly don’t mean anything gourmet or even anything fancy-shmancy. I’m just talking being able to put together a meal that not only tastes good and is healthy, but is actually served hot.

After I made my first batch of dishes and they turned out surprisingly well, cooking was no longer intimidating, as I found out I could do it passably well, and all I had to do was follow the recipes. After that, I realized something else: Recipes are just suggested plans. I could change ingredients and proportions, as long as I did it sensibly, and the end result was just fine. The only reason to follow recipes slavishly is if you always want the same results. But since my cooking motto is “Close enough is good enough,” I deviate from the recipes as often as I follow them. And while some of my improvisations ended in more than a few less-than-delicious meals, they were still eminently edible to me and the PB&J Princess.

And something that was a delightful surprise: Some dishes that I thought would be difficult, if not impossible to prepare, turned out easy-peasy. Foremost among them are my all-time favorite Chinese foods — hot and sour soup and egg drop soup. I could eat them every other day and never tire of them. Because I’ve always thought of them as exotic fare, I always thought they were impossible for an amateur to make. But guess what? Each one, from start to finish, takes no more than 25 minutes. And best of all, the ones I’ve made are every bit as delicious as the ones I’ve had in all the Chinese restaurants I’ve been in all my life.

Just FYI, I’m not alone in that opinion. No less a gourmet than Jen-Ex herself said my soups are so fabulous I should consider opening up a hole-in-the-wall Chinese soup place — something I doubt will ever happen.

But if it does, I’ve already got its name, which is A Wok on the Wild Seide.