Meditating ktichen

“Are you going to cook for the week?” my dad asked.

“Why would I do that?” 

“So you don’t have to be bothered during the week,” my dad’s voice was earnest. So far away, my parents look for ways to be helpful in my everyday life. For my dad, truncating my cooking schedule seemed an easy fix. But cooking for me is as much the point as eating the food I prepare. Anyone who knows me knows how much I adore food and how much gravity equating the two holds.

But I have discovered I enjoy the process.

When I lived in South Africa I cooked out of necessity. Tucked away in a village with no refrigeration (except the frigidness of the tin roofed concrete house in winter) anything that wasn’t bagobe (the staple food akin to grits) and soya mince (soy based MSG filled faux meat) had to be made from scratch. Peace Corps volunteers that preceded me had done the heavy lifting, they had converted recipes from home into ingredients readily available in the local economy. Everything from samosas to beagles, and cinnamon rolls to Kahlua. 

I started out with the bread based foods. Proofing yeast and waiting for dough to rise were mildly time-consuming tasks that gave me something to do when school was out when I arrived in my village. Cinnamon rolls were delicious, but they were also my initial companion, until I made friends. later it was beagles, rise and punch down and rise and punch down. Form a ring, boil and then bake. Again, a methodical all day task. 

I graduated to samosas and enchiladas. I taught my host family how to make mac and cheese and French toast. But back then I didn’t love the process. I appreciated the process, loved the product. But a few months before I departed south Africa when the heat became too much and burst my bag of tomatoes, enticing every fruit fly in the area to descend like a storm cloud on my produce, I gave up. I turned to boiled eggs and peanut butter sandwiches. I didn’t cook anything of substance and food became something to prevent me from starving.

Back in the US food receded again. It was something that I could purchase as easy as I could make it. I was on the road a lot so eating out was my norm. 

In New Zealand, cooking became a tandem sport. Ess and I cooked together most nights. We didn’t have a lot of variety but we had a rhythm that we fell into.

Uganda brought me back to cooking. Less about survival, cooking in Uganda was a mandatory if I wanted any kind of diversity. Three basic ingredients (eggplant, tomatoes, and a kale-like green) forced me to get creative.  But my kitchen was small and shared and so cooking then was about the product, not the process.

About a year ago I fell into cooking again. I can’t pinpoint the moment or the meal, only that now, searching for recipes or finding new ingredients has become as much the point as the Persian rice or moussaka or lemon lava cake. I am soothed by the measuring, by the whisking, the tasting and tweaking of flavors on my spoon. It is what leads me to make fresh baked bread on a Tuesday night, because the vegetable soup I am making would be better with bread. It is what calls me to search out lard, because I want to make tortillas and the ones I made with oil didn’t seem quite right. It is what has me crafting lemon curd on a Friday night, peering into the lightly bubbling pot- the scent of citrus wafting to my nose, so it will be ready for the cake I’m making tomorrow.

Eating isn’t the only point anymore…the process is.

Not every meal is a success. Some days I sweat over a recipe that is less than stellar, or bring some vision in my head to a bear only to discover I should have left it there. But even when it fails, even when I am eating something mediocre or attempting to doctor something bad, the process is soothing. The process extracts my day from the forefront of my brain and lets me be…in my kitchen.