Television chefs astound me. They rush around in their
perfectly organised TV studio kitchen preparing gourmet meals in under thirty
minutes (while leaving the rubbish and the pots for someone else to sort out)
and then say “What could be simpler than that?”.
Well Jamie, have you never heard of a microwave? Remove seal… wait for the ping… chow down.
Simple! It may not be as delicious as the tiny thing that you created but it’s
certainly much, much simpler and much more filling. And so is that staple of
student cuisine, the Pot Noodle.
These cookery shows provide great entertainment but for many
people they have as much to do with the food that they actually eat as Top Gear has to most people’s cars. In
real life most of us treat food as just fuel. I guess that’s why we have such
an obesity problem. Open mouth – stuff fuel in – burn fuel off somehow –
repeat. Food is not there for taste it's just to make us feel full, so we can't
be bothered about taking the time to make it wholesome, nutritious and
delicious. Even more importantly in these busy days, cooking is a time-thief.
We can't afford to spend half the day preparing your half-hour dinner because
if we did we'd miss our favourite cooking programme.
So why should we be bothered to actually ‘cook’ meals as
opposed to simply reheating things? Why on earth would anybody want to spend
three, four or more hours chopping, stirring, baking, rolling, blitzing (I
could go on) food which will, in all probability, be wolfed down in less than
ten minutes? And don’t forget the washing up. Sometimes that alone can take
longer than the eating time.
I appreciate that it can be a bonding thing between the one
who cooks and the ones who eat but that’s not always immediately obvious. A
single mum who puts food in front of three teenage boys is unlikely to
experience much in the way of gratitude. She'll count herself lucky if they
even eat it in the same room as her.
My Beloved, however, certainly does appreciate it when I
make the effort to cook something. She says that she loves the food itself and
the fact that she’s not had to cook it. That's really nice of her. It's always
good to be appreciated.
But I don’t do it for her. I don't do it for the cookery
element at all. I do it to relax. It might not seem it when I'm running around
opening the cooker far too often to check on the contents while stirring with
one hand and rummaging at the back of the fridge for some obscure ingredient with
the other, all the while checking the tick-tick-tick of the clock as it slowly
creeps to the precise second when my food should be done, but I find cooking
relaxing. The following of precise and predictable recipies makes me
concentrate on one thing, just one thing, at once - my brain doesn't have time
to do its usual hyperspeed hunt-and-peck at things that I didn't know I was
supposed to be worrying about. It just has to stop and focus totally on the
unfamiliar act of folding or basting or whatever it is that's number thirty-six
in the method on the recipe sheet. I cook to stop me thinking about other
stuff, and if I produce something tasty (or at least something that doesn't
give us both a case of runny-tummy) at the end of it then that's a bonus.
But, just like those television chefs, if I’ve cooked it
then someone else can do the washing up.
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