Food For Awesome Thought

I grew up with four brothers and a set of parents that were busily working full-time to help support us in the future. Needless to say, we were basically left to our own devices to concoct any sort of mad scientist meal from the ingredients that we had kicking around in the kitchen. While I mastered the many culinary skills of cracking an egg inside a bowl of ramen to cook, pouring cereal for lunch, or placing impeccably cut hotdog rounds and placing them lovingly atop a bed of macaroni and cheese to serve up to my hungry siblings, I never quite learned how to actually cook real food, and it haunted me well into my adult life.
My friends found it humorous that late into my 20s that I was eating like a 15 year old boy with no adult supervision, so I made a concentrated effort to learn to cook real foods. It started out haltingly. At first I would thumb through home magazines picking out quaint looking recipes that I could dream of gracing my kitchen table with. Many kitchens ended up filled with smoke, and many chickens sat sadly on the baking pan covered in ham and only cooked halfway through while I rushed out to get some Chinese takeout. But one day after many efforts it just clicked, and meals started coming together for me. Having been in such a large family, and it only being my husband and myself now, out of sheer instinct, I was soon cooking up curries, stews, taco bakes, and strudels for a slew of imaginary people that were not going to get fed.
As we trudged our way through the massive amount of leftovers, I realized that we should not just be enjoying all of this wonderful food for ourselves that I have been cooking. So I would invite a few friends over at a time for dinner. We would have wonderful conversation, they would pitch in on meals, and even the confident ones would dig in and help out with the cooking. Cooking for me now has become so much more than just placing a meal on the table and mindlessly chewing it down because of the mere fact that I am hungry. It has become a bonding experience, time for good conversation, and a way to be able to interact with people in a way that is so much different than just talking about work.
When you are cutting up vegetables and throwing them into a steamer, or when you are trying to learn how to cook a turkey for the first time, things get expressed and shared on a whole different level of interaction as opposed to say, just sitting down to a bag of fast food and tuning out to watch television. I live for being able to see the joy, or even sometimes false joy at times I’m sure, on people’s faces as they take that first bite of something I have prepared and knowing that we all took some part in creating that moment.
I get a sense of solace and calm whenever I bake some sweets for people that I know will appreciate them. There is also a feeling of accomplishment that comes from being able to whip something up from scratch and then see the look of surprise on my husband’s face when I bring some cookies into a room for him. I know most people would think that it’s just cooking, it can’t be that big of a deal, but I have been able to make it into so much more. In these busy times of being in school, working, and not being able to interact with my friends and loved ones as much as I would like to, we have made food into something that we can all fit into our hectic lifestyles, because hey, everyone could always use a nice home cooked meal, and it isn’t a guilty pleasure that you have to rationalize.