anxious kitchen escapades
When the COVID scare started in early 2020, I started working from home. While my mom hit the road running with her bread baking, ice cream churning, and hotel-style sambar making (thanks to Venkatesh Bhat), my overture to the kitchen was more timid. I started with an IG trend - Dalgona coffee. It looked deceptively easy as all time-lapsed cooking videos do. However, I ended up with an underwhelming product that bore only a passing resemblance to the real thing.
There my mother was, pulling off the trifecta of taste, presentation, and inventiveness on a near-daily basis, and I had failed at whisking coffee water.
a half-cooked adult
I have my mom to thank for keeping me well-fed, but I’ll be 26 this September, and it is becoming less and less acceptable that I can’t put together a meal at a moment’s notice.
It is not that I don’t know how to cook (or so I tell myself). My mom is a great instructor. She says a lot of quote-worthy things, but I am an inconsistent student and falter when I step into the kitchen after a month of doing very little.
For the longest time, I thought I hated cooking, but it is actually the act of pausing for instructions I have a problem with. I prefer cooking like I prefer my walking and train travel. All by my lonesome and with stops few and far between.
It bothers me that nothing has yet sunk into the realm of muscle memory. But I don’t practice often, so I have to build my momentum from scratch every time. It is a vicious cycle. I take copious notes the first time around but I have to refer to them every two minutes to make sure I read the ingredients correctly and added them in the right order. I’m too scatter-brained to remember the steps and too anxious to freestyle when the stove is on.
While I love the many things my mom and sister cook, left to my own devices, I am hardly in the mood for horizon expansion. I am cocooned in my comfort zone of potato fries, pizza, and sambar saadam, and the rest of the culinary floor is lava. Combined with my inherent neurosis in the kitchen, I do not see myself achieving major milestones in my cooking life.
a better way to enjoy food (for me)
Though I lack in my personal curiosity for food, I am intrigued by what it tells about people. Every occasion, no matter their nature, calls for eating together. What someone loves to eat is reflective of the life they lead, and their choices and preferences are inevitably forged by every town, every city, and every country, they’ve been to in their lives.
Kate Wagner from derailleur writes, “I’m here to have an experience on behalf of other people. That’s what writers do, after all.”
And food writing takes this to a whole new level. You can conjure up scenes and sounds, but the English language feels sourly inadequate in vocabulary that pertains to taste and scent. Words and metaphors are mere stand-ins that would not deliver in the hands of a lesser writer. But done right, it is a treat to read.
My current favorites:
Tracy Wan’s newsletter Adapted From: She writes about home-cooking dishes from around the world, their history, cultural significance in the modern world, and the trajectory they took to pique her interest and end up in her kitchen.
Folu’s newsletter Unsnackables: She’s an enthusiast of international snacks she can’t try. I implore you to read her. Pick any issue. They’re all delightful.
Food newsletters have become a staple in my daily reading, and naturally, I am envious of these writers. My relationship with food and eating feels stunted in comparison.
Ingredient names, each specific and with its own sensory landscape, are lost in the quicksand of my memory. I could never present a nuanced breakdown of the food I eat since I know very little about the process to offer insight and also because I haven’t tried enough to make cogent comparisons. With very little to draw from, I am always shortchanged for words when it comes to food.
hero of the week
Every adventure needs a hero, and our hero of the week is…
While I struggle to understand food and unpack the taste, there is a person that writes in-depth reviews of chips. I wish they started a newsletter so I could read them from the comfort of my inbox, but oh well.