Wednesday, April 07, 2004
cooking
I've been doing a lot of cooking lately.
There's something soothing about compiling ingredients, preparing them, combining them in proscribed ways, and producing something savory or sweet.
There's also a measure of control to it. If I mismeasure or substitute bread flour for cake flour, the results are my fault, whether good or bad.
Yet, to a certain extent, I cannot be held accountable for the results if I followed the recipe to the letter and it turned out badly. The fault is on the test kitchen drone who wrote it out.
But I digress.
Cooking. We all must eat. Most of us like to eat certain things, or at least certain kinds of things. Cooking lets me take control of the things I like to eat. It's a power thing. And I acknowledge the power aspect. When I am sifting, scooping, heating, turning, deglazing, and folding in the kitchen, a small voice whispers to me that I'm turning the clock back: where's your husband? sitting on his kiester in front of the boob tube...
But I don't want him in my kitchen. I want total control over my food, what goes in it and when, and how finely it's been chopped, sliced, or diced.
And that control is soothing. Relaxing. Reassuring.
Edit:
Except the cleaning part. I hate the cleaning part. NOT relaxing, not reassuring. And not guaranteed I won't have to do it because sometimes the kitchen is just too dirty to live with.
There's something soothing about compiling ingredients, preparing them, combining them in proscribed ways, and producing something savory or sweet.
There's also a measure of control to it. If I mismeasure or substitute bread flour for cake flour, the results are my fault, whether good or bad.
Yet, to a certain extent, I cannot be held accountable for the results if I followed the recipe to the letter and it turned out badly. The fault is on the test kitchen drone who wrote it out.
But I digress.
Cooking. We all must eat. Most of us like to eat certain things, or at least certain kinds of things. Cooking lets me take control of the things I like to eat. It's a power thing. And I acknowledge the power aspect. When I am sifting, scooping, heating, turning, deglazing, and folding in the kitchen, a small voice whispers to me that I'm turning the clock back: where's your husband? sitting on his kiester in front of the boob tube...
But I don't want him in my kitchen. I want total control over my food, what goes in it and when, and how finely it's been chopped, sliced, or diced.
And that control is soothing. Relaxing. Reassuring.
Edit:
Except the cleaning part. I hate the cleaning part. NOT relaxing, not reassuring. And not guaranteed I won't have to do it because sometimes the kitchen is just too dirty to live with.
