I can't seem to get out of the kitchen.
Second only to the bedroom where I sleep, the kitchen is where I log most of my hours these days. Because I'm working from home, I can take meetings in my shotgun kitchen toggling between Zoom meetings, e-mail, and whatever recipe I'm prepping for that day.
In the past few weeks, I've not only baked sourdough nearly every day, but I've also made a homemade ginger bug (for homemade sodas, of course), strawberry jam, a yolky vinaigrette, herby salads, buttery pull-apart dinner rolls, fresh pasta, cookies, brownies, numerous roasts, countless jars of different kinds of stocks. Our fridge is now full of different sauces for endless variations of rice bowls, my favorite being a ginger scallion and soy sauce that honestly goes with anything.
I'm probably a few days away from churning fresh butter.
In all the outside chaos, the kitchen is my place of refuge. It's also unendingly dirty. As much time as I spend sautéing, baking, roasting, I'm putting in just as many hours on the back end washing up. All to do it again the next day. We have so many leftovers that I leave packages of food for friends, neighbors, and anybody who messages me on Twitter. I don't always cook like this.
Other than weekends when I have a little more time, most days I cook a lot of one-pot meals and a side (usually roasted) vegetable or a simple protein and a salad. But lately I can't help but feel drawn to making as much as I can from scratch. It's not the food so much that I'm enjoying—though it's a delicious benefit to all this cooking—but the process of making.
Going back and forth with a sharp knife over cloves of garlic until it's minced fine as sugar or kneading a high-hydration dough until it coheres into a shiny round and the skin of gluten is stretched tight over the surface like a balloon makes me feel settled. The same way it feels after you've been away from home for more than a few days and you sit down in your favorite chair or on the sofa and you know you're back where you belong.
I turn thirty-three tomorrow, and I'm not sure I've ever felt more settled than I do at this moment. Part of me wants to investigate this. What is it about cooking and food that appeals so much to me? How can I break that down into its ingredients and parse it out for whatever secret or code is embedded in the process? Lately though, it's enough just to recognize that it does bring me peace instead of knowing why. I don't always need to know why something works if it does. If my refrigerator breaks down, I'm not so much interested in why it broke down as I am in how to fix it so that it's back up and running.
Cooking seems to fix whatever is in me that tends to break down. So while I still have the luxury of all this time, I'm going to spend it in the kitchen.