For some reason, I am the type of person who needs a return on investment for all aspects of my life. This includes going on vacation. Vacations are not something that I do often or easily. I know that I am wrong in this, so I do try to break the cycle.
If I go out to eat at a restaurant, it is a disappointment if I am not inspired to add a recipe to my portfolio. It doesn’t have to be the exact meal that I had at the restaurant, but I do like it when it sparks something and made to create something that I would not have otherwise.
Seeing what someone can create in a dish can be an artistic expression about is in there her and soul. It is very much like reading a poem or a paragraph in a novel that brings tears to your eyes, food is the same way. It fascinates me that food being something that we all have in common, that we must eat every day, that there is not nearly enough awareness of its power to heal, celebrate, nourish, and elevate.
Please don’t get me wrong here. I also know that there are so many people in the world that scrape crumbs together just to find sustenance and even then it’s not enough. This is certainly a tragedy that should never happen and yet is the most prevalent. I will not pretend in this composition to have any cure for that.
I just got done reading Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kat Flynn. She had recently finished culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in France. She was in a grocery store and she observed women walking around with nothing but processed food and frozen dinners and their shopping carts. She started asking questions and out of that she found nine volunteers to attend a several month cooking class that she gave weekly. The goal was to demonstrate why process foods are unneeded, unhealthy, expensive, and do not save time. The nine volunteers that she found were very different from each other, so I would say that she covered a grand spectrum of people representing all walks of life.
When I found this book last winter in a secondhand bookstore, I knew it was going to be a treasure because it spoke to me on a level that I have been trying to express myself on for so long. I always suspected cooking was not difficult and that what it produced Could beautifully represent the person creating it whoever they were.
The result of this experiment was not a rubber stamping of techniques or procedures, or even recipes, the end result was the liberation of the person inside to be able to create healthy and delicious food for themselves for their families and to inspire others, to quote Captain Spock, “Each according to their gifts.”
You can get to know a person through the food that they are making. The more adverse the situations under which the meal has to be prepared, (except you, cutthroat kitchen, I’m not buying it) The more the makers creativity will shine.
There is one thing that I have learned from this book it is that I need to go home and deprive myself of being able to go out and buy specific ingredients and see what happens. I have lived like that in every aspect when it comes to provisions and it is time I applied it to the culinary side.
Sometimes I do not know how to translate what I feel inside about cooking and how it comes out, but I am trying constantly. There is adventure, there is joy, there is discovery to be had. One thing that is for sure, I will keep on trying. I will not give up.
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