Culinary Therapy and the Multi-Week
Sorry for going missing, from CT, the blogosphere, and real life - I spent most of the week in the navel of Illinois (population 850) on business. I'm quite happy to be back, and if it didn't require me to divulge more about the project than would be approved by my employer, I'd tell you exactly how I came to go off-roading in a PT Cruiser.
On the other hand, perhaps I was participating in CT simply by being there, since everyone says 99% of the American diet (and 10% of the gasoline we use to go grocery shopping) is technically corn (my hotel room had a view).
Let's see, how am I behind? I still owe one Remembered Recipe demonstration from Week 2, which I've decided would be the Childhood Chicken Curry, because, of the top candidates from my List of Lost Food (ok, I'll try to stop the Oh-So-Significant Random Capitalization now), it's the one I've made least-recently (is there a better word for that concept?) that doesn't require turning on the oven. "Dinner" is not a sufficiently special occasion to turn on the oven in mid-August, at least not in this apartment.
What else? Oh, yes, Week 3 assignments.
Heart
First, let's give you something to think about while doing the other tasks:
- What motivates you to want to cook?
I feel like there's some deep significance to the fact that this question even can be phrased in terms of preference, though I also feel like I just don't want to go there.
- What causes you to take joy in cooking?
I guess I do enjoy it when I don't feel like I'm cramming it in between other things I need to do or want to do. Note that, just because I feel like I'm cramming it into my schedule, doesn't mean I actually am. I have the luxury of not joining the busy cult, so my schedule is rarely actually crammed. So I'm not sure why I feel that way.
I enjoy it when I can do it without having to trick myself into not looking at the dishes in the sink, or without having to go scrambling for a clean cutting board.
I don't enjoy it - or, at least, I don't have the patience for it, when I'm hungry. This is a problem for fairly obvious reasons - why would I cook if I'm not hungry?
I haven't attached any existential bliss to cooking, and I rather hesitate to do so, because that's not really any different than summoning up a mood. And you'll never always be in the mood, so that doesn't actually end up doing much in the way of providing impulse for something that pretty much always has to happen, in one form or other.
Breath
Clean out the storage where you keep basic pots and pans. You know the drill. Consider removing -- or at least storing elsewhere -- the items you rarely or never use. Deal with the dented and the broken. And put it all back in good order.
I've done this recently enough to be comfortable that everything's in order.
Bones
Evaluate whether your pot-and-pan stock matches with your most likely cooking habits. My relationship with vegetables would probably be improved if I owned a pot suitable for cooking small quantities of the dratted things.
I'm pretty sure this is ok. If, as my habits evolve, this turns out not to be the case, that's the sort of thing I can be trusted to notice and fix.
Head
Find a recipe for something you don't regard as scary-difficult but have somehow not gotten around to making. Make it!
Stay tuned.
She's back!
ReplyDeleteSo you got me thinking about why I separate "cooking" from "preparing food with the intent of not starving to death." For me, it's the creativity element again -- a moment of examining assumptions that's going to help feed a much longer discussion of Toast and of how contemporary assumptions about cooking turn us Toastward without helping us develop strong Toast Alternatives.
Hm...I get that.
ReplyDeleteIn pondering your response to the same question, it occurred to me that there have been seasons in my life in which cooking served as a creative outlet, but this isn't one of them - either other parts of my life serve that purpose, or the need is manifesting in some different way, or something. Right now, a charge to be creative in the kitchen wouldn't be much but a demand on mental/emotional/creative/whatever energy that I don't necessarily have to spare for that purpose. I know that for some people the creative aspect of cooking is of fundamental and perpetual importance, but that's not me, so even when I'm in the mood, I'd feel disingenuous rhapsodizing about it.
This is why cooking from a book can serve more than one purpose. It can be purely instructional where needed, but it can also be a way to generate something worth eating without having to make so many decisions.