Kitchen 101

88% of our awareness is filtered through our eyes, while the other senses transmit the rest.  I think of this somewhere between considering that one should always add at least two more cloves of garlic to a meal than might seem humanly acceptable, that zucchini is the best vegetable ever, whether or not I am 'eating the rainbow' in this meal (and is the rainbow all it's really cracked up to be?), as well as the notion that one cook recently shared with me, namely that cooking, after sex, is the most intimate thing that we can do for one another--- we're preparing live things for someone to eventually put into their mouth (and maybe that's why, apart from being logistical trumpery, cooking alone can be so alienating).  All good and well, but the onions are sweating, and maybe it's too hot because they're looking a bit worn out and---oh, what spices!?!?---finally I'm sweating more than my onions and I'm crying (and thinking that we need to, as a society, somehow honor the sheer genius of this make-my-prey-cry self-defense mechanism that onions have somehow evolved and how it's like the plant equivalent to opposable thumbs).

Cooking is supposed to be relaxing?

One friend told me that cooking is really, really simple--- you just have to prepare everything beforehand.  In dicing and slicing, one creates space in which to simply contemplate what's at hand; some time to handle the vegetables, see exaclty what you're working with.  The odd tamato is already too soft.  Snake-skin belly of the red pepper.  Seeds peppered throughout the eggplant meat.  These are still living things in some sense, things that can very much so still be communicated with.  A feel-up at the market is one thing, but in undressing one's food, the intimacy begins.  And as we all know, the longer the buildup, the better.

I got it the other day, seemingly.  No music in the background.  One dice per heartbeat.  Watch the onions sweat, so you don't have to.  Sincerely, slow. 

Suddenly, as I stick my head over the plume of steam swelling from the sauteeing eggplant, I get a blast of a rich, woody/caramel waft that something deep down in my inherent animal constitution simply says yes to.  In that face-full of steam, the 12% of awareness normally dedicated to the 'other' senses came alive. 

And there it is--- now, I'm cooking.