Cooking through chaos

Today is Friday the 13th and we were all joking going into the day but the morning was at least 20 extra levels of unnecessary chaos by people panic-reacting to other people, fear and trauma playing into fear and trauma and spinning up up up.  I reached noon shaky and having completed almost nothing meaningful – not shaky because of what was going on, but completely furious at how so many people had been forced to run around batshit because someone was scared of someone else.  It’s terrible and unreasonable and broken and can go fuck itself.

I need to go jump up and down and then maybe sprint and then I need very much to get in the kitchen and start cooking, if I feel like I’m not likely to inadvertently slice a fingertip off out of distraction.  Instead I get to continue sitting at my computer through hours of completely pointless meetings, until my time is up, at which point I am thoroughly pickled in my stress response and probably too exhausted to sprint.

I learned to cook in my teens, around when I went vegetarian.  Part of it was trying to impress a fella with my grown-up-ness (as one does), and part of it was recognizing the likelihood that I would not be fed if I couldn’t cook my own meals.  My mother was a passive-aggressive cook whose strongest kitchen skill was driving to a restaurant, and she had little patience for my burgeoning conscience requiring anything other than what she already wanted to do.  If I wanted to explore vegetarian food, I was on my own.

Cooking rapidly became a way of asserting my independence. 

It was something I discovered I could do and she couldn’t; it was a way for me to take care of myself when she wouldn’t; it was a way for me to show that I was a capable human being when she wasn’t.  I can feed myself and others.  I cooked on camping trips, I cooked at friends’ houses, I cooked bougie ramen for myself at home with chives snipped from the pot on the deck.  When I went to college, I mostly failed entirely to cook until I was living off-campus in my third year and had an actual kitchen, where I started working through Linda McCartney’s “World of Vegetarian Cooking.”  Linda told me I should be making my own vegetable stock, so I did, my roommate and I standing over the pot when I was done, fishing out and eating the overcooked celery and carrot chunks and talking and talking.  Linda insisted that risotto wasn’t as scary as people said, and I mastered it, the infinite stirring and listening for the thwup-thwup-thwup sound of the cooking rice saying it was time to add another ladle of that homemade stock. 

Linda said that food could be delicious and actually not terrible for you, and that it could be prepared with love.  These were foreign ideas to me.  Delicious food had always been terrible for you, and food was prepared with resignation because there were people who needed to eat, not because you liked cooking and wanted to feed them.

Captain Awkward has a bit about “sometimes love is a sandwich” and I have found that absolutely to be true.

I could never really convince my ex that I loved him, but I could cook and cook for him and we could both exult in my cooking skills and we could pretend that I did it out of love, and that was enough for a while.  I can cook for my once-gentleman-friend-now-husband and express my love and care by stuffing every possible vegetable into every possible dish, I will keep you safe and healthy with vegetables, my darling, and avoiding foods that I know destroy his digestive system (cinnamon, weirdly) or that he can’t force his way through (cilantro, fennel, honestly most spices).  Cooking for him has refocused me toward transforming ingredients through technique rather than blasting someone with complexity of flavor – he’s a super-taster, and the way I learned to cook was MOAR EVERYTHING, and I can’t do that if I want him to enjoy what I make.  He finds the smallest hints of things that I can’t even identify in a finished dish.  He probably knows that I’m sneaking in ginger and cumin sometimes and doesn’t say anything, poor man. 

But I can chiffonade a head of cabbage, toss it with olive oil and salt and maybe turkey bacon, and roast it on a sheet pan at 400 for half an hour, and it turns sublime – charred in places, salty in places, the sulfur barely peeking through the sweetness that happens when cabbage gets hot and wilts. 

He loves this, and is always surprised to find himself that excited about cabbage.  Even the toddler runs up demanding “cauliflower” and will happily take the chunks that I assess won’t choke her when she scarfs them too quickly.

This was supposed to be about me and I end up talking about others.  And cabbage.  Honestly, everyone should be talking more about cabbage, it’s the best.  (FYI you can cook it hotter than 400 F, it’ll go faster, I keep it at 400 because I’m using a non-stick sheet and I’m not sure whether higher temperatures cause off-gassing into my food, this is a difficult topic to find credible sources on…)

For me, cooking is DOING a THING when the world seems to be conspiring to keep me from doing what I think I need to be doing. 

It’s never not productive.  It always makes something good and nourishing at the end, unless I manage to really screw it up (…I burnt a brisket pretty good the other day, I didn’t have enough liquid in and left the pot on the stove for…uh…like 3 hours.  But it was still actually not bad, even though the vegetables I added turned a creepy black color and scared my kid away).  It’s protecting against future risk by, say, adding food to the freezer that we can extract and heat months from now when we are too tired/sick/depressed to cook.  I realize that by filling my freezer, I am assuming that the future will be worse than the present.  That feels noteworthy.

But I can prepare for that worse future by cooking!  And then we have food!  At least we have food, I can think to myself.  I have done a thing and now we are slightly safer.  My moon in Taurus in the second house is, naturally, delighted.  (And also, naturally delighted.)

One of my teachers says that if you feel unsafe, do a thing that makes you feel safer.  He means a ritual thing (this does not mean “buy a gun,” folks), but cooking can be a ritual.  I wash the rice before I turn on the rice cooker.  I fill the pot with water and swish it around in a figure eight, the grains slipping between my fingers, the water clouding with starch.  I drain the water, I refill, I swish, drain, refill, swish. 

Eventually, the water runs clear, the rice is ready to cook.  To nourish us and be delicious.  To cradle our vegetables and meats or fish or tofu, to cradle us at the end of a frustrating day.  And I have done the thing, and now we are cradled.  Now I am cradled.

When I cook, I am a grown-up, capable of nourishing and reassuring and delighting my loved ones.  And myself.

Maybe eventually “and myself” will not be the afterthought there.  Meanwhile, at least we have food.