Cooking

I blog a lot about food, though this blog has somewhat been taken over by running, and I think it's probably pretty clear from my recipes and my posts that I love to cook and spend a lot of my time and energy thinking about food and making food and ... well, eating food, of course.

I've alluded to the family's love of food and cooking before, and so it will probably surprise no one that I come by my foodishness naturally.  My grandmother on my dad's side is an amazing cook, a woman who used to host the kinds of corporate dinner parties you only see now on television.  My grandmother majored in home economics in college (she's 94, and I'm proud that she is the second generation of college-educated women in my family; I am the fourth) and is an experimental and daring cook compared with the norms of Midwest 1950s, so my dad and his siblings grew up on curry and lobster, as well as twice-baked potatoes and homemade pasta. My aunt Esther inherited her skills and her love of food, and is my inspiration in all things gustatory.

My mother is also a great cook, and furthermore devoted an impressive amount of time and effort to quality and home-made food for us kids, so I grew up relatively free of artificial colors, instant boxed meals, and white bread.  My mother worked around the two pickiest eaters ever born and gave us healthy and yummy food, so we modeled our eating habits on that pattern.  I still can't eat sugary cereal or abide fake cheese, for example.

Anyway, I was always interested in food.  Growing up, my sister and I would do "Patio Court" for our parents, an imaginary restaurant that involved us moving the table out onto the deck, carefully setting it with the good dishes, and then carefully cooking a "fancy" dinner for them to eat out there.  Sometimes we were successful, sometimes not, but I am grateful that my parents were willing to let us try to cook everything on our own and learn to have fun with cooking for real.  I also used to watch cooking shows and try to replicate things I'd seen, from fancy chocolate garnishes to homemade pasta, often without a recipe.  I often failed, but again, my parents were supportive of my various kitchen experiments.

My parents were also really encouraging of self-sufficiency when it came to food.  They kept the breakfast cereal on a bottom shelf and put a small amount of milk in a kid-size pitcher on a reachable shelf in the fridge so that I could get my own breakfast from kindergarten on.   So I grew up enjoying food and eating and with a lot of freedom to try things and make things so long as I followed basic health rules.

However, it was in college that I really began to think of cooking as my primary hobby and social outlet, a way to bring people together and create a home where we didn't really have one.  I even cooked in the dorm, in the one kitchen in the dorm building, to make special dinners for my boyfriend and friends.  I made really simple things like big batches of fry bread, and really homey things like casseroles, and nothing terribly amazing.  Later in college, when I lived off-campus, I cooked more and more, often for big groups of people.  I hosted dinner parties and holiday dinners and fed my housemates on a regular basis.  I got better at cooking.  I made homemade pasta, I made my own soup stock, and I got creative.  I fed The Husband, who was then The Boyfriend, because left to his own devices, he would either forget to eat or live on $5 pizzas and late-night quesadillas.

I love to have people over for dinner, and I love to cook surrounded by friends and laughter and conversation.  I feel truly in my element under those circumstances, like I am where I was meant to be and the universe makes sense and is a joyous place.  Food is good.