Some people like to cook. Some people love to cook. Some people, namely myself, feel so compelled to cook that it transcends like or love and jumps straight into the world of compulsion.
On a typical morning I open my eyes and think, 'Hey, I am awake...what should I cook today?' People in my life have always been put off by this. I have often heard,"We haven't even had breakfast yet and you are asking me about dinner?!"
But a good meal takes planning. I don't want to decide at noon that I would really love some slow cooked, pulled pork bar-b-q because, come on people, to do that right takes all day. Breakfast is easy. Dinner is art.
No, I do not work at some upscale restaurant. I am just a stay at home mom who spends the majority of her time picking toys up off of the floor and wiping noses. I drive a mini van for crying out loud. Nothing fancy here. I just really love to cook food. Some people watch football on Sundays, I watch marathons of the latest season of Hell's Kitchen. While those football fanatics are screaming at refs about foul balls, or bad passes, or some other error in judgement that I know little about I am sitting on my couch screaming obscenities at the morons in Chef Ramsey's kitchen that can't even saute a scallop.
Because I can do that. I have practiced. And no one in my house even likes seafood.
The act of cooking in itself is cathartic, really. Many times the stresses of the day have just melted away in the wafting garlic scented steam floating off of my Paula Deen cookware. I may have two small children grabbing onto each leg while screaming pint-sized profanities at each other ('booger head!' 'stink butt!') but in my mind I am in an open air kitchen in Tuscany listening to Dean Martin sing "That's Amore". Food can do that.
It is fall now, which means pie season in my house has officially opened. No license required. We are killing some pies around here and I am mounting a photo of every one on my Facebook wall as tribute and trophy. My children L, who is almost 3, and D, who is almost 2, sit at their little IKEA child table and roll out salt dough and set it into tin pie plates while their Mama stands at the kitchen counter and feeds her addiction. Pumpkin pie, Apple pie, Dutch Apple Pie, Pumpkin Mousse Pie, Chocolate Pie...in an effort to make room on my counter I have carried pies to my neighbor's houses. I give cookies away at the gym where I am a member. I take cupcakes to people at stores that I regularly frequent. Every time I am met with the same look of concern for my sanity and I think 'What has this world come to that a person can't create something delicious in their kitchen and bring it to the people in their daily lives as a small way of saying thanks for being here?'
I have been really lucky in my life. And I can't lie and say I have always been a good, or hard working, person. It took me a long time to mature and having two children in two years helped with that. I spent a lot of my young adult hood drinking, and partying, and looking down my nose at life and people who valued it. But even then I cooked. I once woke up from a drunken night of revelry to have my fellow partiers all telling me what great enchiladas I had made the night before. Sure enough, even inebriated beyond the point of being coherent I had been standing in a kitchen over a stove cooking.
Then I got sober and right after that I got pregnant for the first time and after he was born I got pregnant again (I guess nobody explained what causes that to me, huh?) and then my husband and the father of my babies went to work one day and never came home. My then husband suffered a traumatic brain injury on the job and spent seven months in a vegetative state. Every day that he was in the hospital I went and stayed with him. The whole time I was pregant with my daughter D. And the whole time I cooked. Pies, cakes for AA Meetings, cookies, spaghetti, casseroles, whatever I could cook I cooked.
And I still believe to this day it helped save me. I did not lose my sanity even when he finally died after struggling for so long.
And now that the little ones are turning three and two I cook even more than I ever have. Every day is a new reason to cook something delicious. Every night me and the kids and the new man in our lives sit down to a meal and talk about our days. It brings us together and I am happy to be able to be a part of that. It makes me feel that there has been one cohesive theme through all the turmoil in my life and that theme wasn't negative or sad or depressing...it was good. Life is good. Food is good.
And food has to be cooked.
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