For the first time in a long time, my mother was out of the house and so the ominous responsibility of cooking the chicken for our lunch fell on my father’s shoulder, a responsibility he accepted with a derisive snort claiming it to be a menial chore for someone of his culinary caliber. As soon as she had turned the key in the lock my father appeared in my room and towered over me. He looked me in the eye, and said to me the words I will never forget, “So, son do you mind taking over the chicken?” Without waiting for an answer he said, “Alright, thanks!”
Then avoiding the look on my face for fear of being petrified he quickly scooted out of the room and back to his stock portfolio. What he could not have known was that he had just forced me to take the first step on my journey on a culinary path that was to spark a life-long love with food and cooking.
As I entered the kitchen I experienced some sort of divine emotion, happiness like no other I had ever felt, and immediately I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life… is what I wished had happened. In actuality, I felt nada. I looked outside at the depressing landscape, the dirty, hot and grimy afternoon with pigeons cooing, and I thought to myself, “I wonder what Master chef would look like if they had cooked in places like this?”
Anyway, sighing audibly to let my father know he owed me one, I took out a pan and drizzled some oil on it, turned on the gas and watched it bubble, a bit too closely apparently because before I knew it the oil had splattered onto my arm and left me tearing up. Shocked at how much it hurt, I gained a newfound respect for my mother as the sight of various burns she had endured over the years cooking for me suddenly became vivid in my mind.
I cooked the chicken with a sometimes painful, sometimes scary, intuitive approach, scalding my fingers every time I touched the chicken to test the cook inside. Finally, a painstaking 27 minutes later I called out to my father and asked him to taste. He took a piece of the chicken that I had cooked and picked it up gently cradling it, blowing at it to cool it down a bit. He then popped the piece into his mouth and his eyes closed. I waited with bated breath for his judgment. Just before I could ask him how it was, he smiled, ever so slightly but that smile was unmistakable. It was the smile of a deliriously happy man. In that instant, I knew, that this was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I wanted to make people happy by putting something delicious on a plate.
This is what pushes people to stand for hours and cook, I realized, the intensely rewarding feeling that you get when someone smiles from within, the intense release of dopamine that makes you feel like doing it all over again because, at the end of the day, this messy business yields a reward far beyond the confines of something materialistic, it yields something indescribable, a strange mixture of happiness and pride and…
Oh Dear God, I’ve burnt the rice
So maybe blogging while cooking wasn’t the best idea…