I got really into cooking this past
summer. There was the wonderful Farmers Market, the
higher energy levels that summer weather seems to bring, the fact
that Peter was sleeping through the night pretty well during those
months (see "Sleep Deprivation Revisited" post), but, most of all, there was this book: Sear, Sauce and Serve by Tony Rosenfeld:
This is my favorite cookbook to date. I
liked everything about this cookbook: the mix-and-match philosophy,
the author's quirky tips and personal experiences, the
exotic “feel” to many of the recipes, and the relative ease with
which I could obtain the ingredients and make them. A gift from my mother-in-law, I read it
cover-to-cover (who does that with a cookbook?). I looked and
re-looked over the recipes, meal-planed almost exclusively from its
pages, and even made copious notes in the margins. I was on
a roll. The “searing” was working, the “sauces” were
delicious, and the
“serving” with a starchy side was taking our meals to
photograph-worthy status. Here are a couple of meals made during this
golden period of cooking:
“To everything there is a season”
and that certainly held true here. As my excitement over
cooking waned and my freezer increasingly filled with frozen pot
pies, I started to wonder what had happened. I had been ready to
write “cooking” in glowing letters on my list of interests, and, while I wasn't ready to strike it off completely yet, could someone who'd now
hardly cooked a home-made meal in weeks really put it on her list of
happiness-inducing hobbies? I think so. Here's why.
Isn't almost any interest or hobby a
mixed bag? For instance, I love deciding what pictures and
decorative papers will look good together on a scrapbook page, and, even
more, I enjoy the finished outcome, but I don't particularly enjoy
the tedious cutting and gluing or the ache in my back that follows. I like writing and
blogging and seeing my written words on the page, but I'll
admit that I enjoy starting the post so much more than finishing it.
You get the idea. Now back to cooking.
I can't think of anything more fulfilling at a more basic level than
feeding yourself and your family. And the sensory delights abound.
It's an activity that's got all 5 senses pretty well covered. I love
the sizzle when the meat hits the pan, the fresh smell of cilantro or
ginger as you chop it, the bright smoothness of a red bell
pepper...and we haven't even got to "taste" yet. The
downside? Well, most obviously, there's the mess (the universal bane
of home cooks everywhere), the times the meal completely flops (which
seems to happen more often than you'd expect in my case -when will I learn to
stop trusting Indian recipes with their suggested green chili
amounts?), all the
burning/under-cooking/forgetting-to-get-the-rice-in-the-rice-cooker-soon-enough
drama, and, perhaps worst of all, the general sense of disappointment
and waste when something just doesn't turn out as well as you'd have
expected -in the absence of any obvious cooking faux paux. I just found this quote from the introduction of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook by Deb Perelman and had to include it here: "I've noticed the nobody hates cooking as much as they hate the roulette of not knowing if their time, money, and efforts are going to be rewarded by a recipe that exceeds expectations. And I'm no different..." For me, it's especially bad when I attempt to replicate a dish that someone has served me in the past (e.g. “But I remember your mother's chicken and rice tasting so much better than this”). I also get bogged down with meal planning. Does this sound familiar do anyone?: “I've
planned like three whole meals already...isn't that enough for the month?”
It would seem that cooking is indeed a "mixed bag" of
good and bad experiences. And yet, looking at cooking -or any
other interest for that matter- through the "mixed bag" framework doesn't make a lot of
sense to me. After all, are there any activities that I enjoy
in their entirety -not to mention 100% of the time? Maybe a healthy
dose of realism and perspective is in order. But it's more than that.
I don't want to view the bad things in the "cooking bag" as, well, bad. After all, we often learn the most from our failures. Or at least I think we could. I think I could (despite being downright crumby at it now). In fact, I think that learning to do so is absolutely key to happiness. So I'm on the look-out for ways to really internalize this notion. Maybe a way to mentally re-frame these types
of minor failures as a “celebrations of trying?” And here's some more food for thought. A post a friend made a while back on her blog (http://www.afarewelltocant.com): "The difference between doing nothing
and something is huge; the difference between doing something
imperfectly and perfectly? Not so huge." There's a great accompanying
graphic with that goes with this idea:
Is the “bad” always so
“bad” when it comes to pursuing interests? What I mean is, would
I feel nearly so proud of my scrapbook had I not put in all the time
gluing and pasting? Would I get the same thrill when a recipe turned
out well if all of my attempts were shining successes? And, what's more, don't we find
all kinds of opportunities for humor and narration precisely from our failures? The time I made inedible-ly, spicy-hot Indian nut soup on two consecutive
occasions certainly gives me me a story to tell.
One final thought on cooking.
Cooking is special in that, unlike other hobbies that
can generally be put on the shelf for long periods of time (e.g.
scrapbooking) cooking is a daily necessity and therefore also a chore.
So I've been thinking about ways to keep cooking more on the interest side of that line and less on the chore side. "Out-to-eat-Fridays" is one idea I really like. Lobster diners are not necessary -an $8 take n' bake pizza or a $6 box of
take-out from Wok on Wheels will suffice. I also like the idea of having a simple but healthy schedule for meal planning during my not-so-into-cooking phases...but more on that to come.
