Cooking in the Kitchen: Comfort or Craziness?
A rapport of my feelings, thoughts, and outlooks about cooking
Posted From: The Bronx, New York, United States
Food is necessary to human life
In a previous post, I discussed how food is imperative to our health as humans. Additionally, I examined food alone is not imperative, but its transformation to meals as necessary for our living as humans. Consuming caloric energy mixed with communion with others enables people to emerge as social creatures. We become human through this daily practice.
The kitchen, as a place
What makes a kitchen?
Imagine a kitchen. Or, google “kitchen.” What comes to mind? Something like this?
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd8124493-b36d-4c55-999e-24f491ab54f6_2234x2000.jpeg)
White cabinets, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, stocked pantry.
However, when I think of a kitchen, I think of this:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc6ad3edf-7534-4ecf-a532-7036d95def53_302x478.jpeg)
This is a picture from a town called Nusa Lembongan (off the coast of Bali) in a kitchen where my fiancée and I prepared a “sweet and sour chicken meal.” It is rudimentary, barebones, and foreign. Nonetheless, the meal turned out awesome.
Think further — is a standalone grill a kitchen?
What then, is the nature of denoting an area a kitchen or not?
Kitchens are a place where people create meals.
Preparing, tasting, and cooking a meal
Search the web for a recipe you have not yet made. If you proceed to make the recipe, notice the process that unfolds:
Gathering the necessary ingredients
Occasional re-reading the steps
Frequent taste-testing
Asking for feedback on the end result
Cooking a new recipe provides a sensation not felt by other activities; ensuring perfection, while basking in mystification of what is to come. This creates a sense of comfort, if the chef rejoices in new experiences, or craziness, if the chef cannot confront the recipe’s nuances in the midst of the wider meal.
In comparison, cooking a familiar meal provides an entirely different experience; self-preparation for the food to come. This creates a sense of comfort, if the chef prepares well, or craziness, if the meal does not go as planned.
By creating meals, we create journeys for ourselves to embark on. We transform ourselves from do-er to a live-er. We enable an existential view of our self-awareness. We live our lives.
This system rests as the foundation of our relation with food, meals, cooking, and others. It is not learned by teaching; it must be learned by living.
First meals, partially made by me
The first meals I created in the kitchen were pancakes. I prepared them on the weekends. At first, I prepared them with family; my dad and siblings would help create the batter and flip the hot cakes. As my middle school years ended and my high school years began, I took it upon myself to make the pancakes — waking up earlier to make sure they were ready when others woke up (fortunately, I still received a bit of assistance on cleanup). The pancakes were always tasty. The recipe stayed the same: the Ultimate Pancakes Recipe, provided by a partially premade Bisquick mix. By creating a meal for my family (albeit not from scratch), I embarked on a journey centered around the meal.
Moving forward in time, I had to sustain myself with energy in college. The dining halls were not cutting it, so, I had to feed off of meals prepared myself, as staying under budget was a necessity for me. Thus, I relied on food for sustenance more so than the value of potential meals — food was food, meals were left at home; cooking was a chore to be completed. Overall, the act of cooking felt crazy to me — from recipe finding to grocery shopping to preparation to not overcooking anything to cleanup. The food I made did not equate to meals and the appliances I used did not equate to a kitchen.
Later meals, reliving the original purpose
In my last year of college, my feelings towards food shifted — I began to invite friends over for meals, prepared the recipes with them, and slowly reminded myself the importance of meals, rather than the food itself. With the help of others, I reclaimed the experiences meals and the kitchen had as an integral part of my adolescence.
After moving in with my fiancée, I compelled myself to look upon food as meals, from Day 1. As such, I started cooking new, complete recipes, refining my culinary skills, plating dishes nicer, and creating time for dedicated meals. In fact, I now track the recipes I cook, as it allows me to connect with the food past the sustenance level — I track the thoughts I had during preparation, creation, and (yes) taste of the meal.
A book I read this past September, Notes from a Young Black Chef: A Memoir by Kwame Onwuachi, refers to these feelings. The book described several concepts that arise while undertaking the process of cooking. A few are below:
Realizing one is alive in the world (by completing mundane tasks, like mincing)
Expressing oneself has to be learnt (via bringing your full-self to the kitchen)
Shaping of oneself (through ideas and creations, generating new outputs)
The Memoir, my past experiences, and these reflections helped me realize being in the kitchen can make me feel a phenomenon: a reassurance of my humanness. Cooking contributes perspective, as I rationalize my own view of food against peers from college, work, and NYC. Cooking allows me to begin to explore, by faintly experiencing, the plight of many women across the globe who are tied to the kitchen as an area of the house. Cooking yields an opportunity to focus my energy inwards, producing a product to be consumed by others around me. Overall, cooking presents comfort and craziness — from situating myself to creating homecooked meals; I am reassured of my humanness, and also, wrangle with the new thoughts brought on by such humanness.
Future meals, thoughts moving forward
In high school, I took classes to learn German. My teacher for three years taught us a saying in my first year of German: Übung macht den Meister (translated as practice makes the master). She explained that practicing does not make someone perfect, rather, it makes them a master. Viewing this idiom now, it directly explains my feelings towards the kitchen, and cooking more broadly; practicing affords experience, in order to better showcase those experiences to others.
Cooking affords me the opportunity to work towards self betterment. By mixing mundane tasks with constant testing and immediate feedback, I better comprehend cause and effect relationships between actions and events. I foresee where problems may arise and plan accordingly. I keep an eye towards the customer (consumers of the meal), actively trying to better their experience. Ultimately, cooking leads to improvements in other areas of life, in the form of supplying cross-cutting Principles.
Cooking, no matter the kitchen, extends beyond the kitchen itself, as cooking shapes our lives to a high degree. Therefore, we must allot thought and attention to this activity, as it shapes our humanness to a higher degree than we might otherwise think.
Next steps
Thank you for reading.
This is post 5.
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