Cooking to Connect

September 2023

My nearly 3-year-old grandson loves to make believe he is cooking. He has his own little play kitchen with all the essential implements at his house. At grandpa’s, he also can make believe he is a chef. I get him some pots, a wooden spoon and a spatula and he concocts all sorts of imaginary feasts. It brings him great delight to serve grandpa pretend pizza or pancakes. When I am actually cooking, he loves to get on a little step ladder and “help”. This has made me ponder the joys and emotive nature of cooking.  And if it is so pleasurable, why do so many adults tend to abhor it?

Everybody must eat. And most people love to. Regardless, everyone talks about food. Trust me, I have worked in the food industry for 40 years.  Food is top-of-mind for everyone, and thankfully, cooking at home is gradually making a comeback. And that is as it should be.  Cooking can provide more than just a meal. The holistic culinary event, from recipe searching, through to serving, can be an exercise in creativity. It can also be pretty good exercise in general, for both your body and your mind. For most, but definitely not everyone, cooking is a rewarding, artistic activity. And that’s a very good thing indeed.

When I first started cooking, I was very young.  Maybe too young to be doing it by myself, but my mother was very indulgent. That is, as long as I cleaned up my messes! By the time I was only 7 or 8 years old, I was exploring the kitchen unsupervised. I became a mad scientist, using my evil genius and a myriad of ingredients to concoct pleasures I shared with the humans in my life. Generally, my unsuspecting friends. Or my pets for that matter.  The kitchen was my laboratory, and the pantry and spice rack were my chemical components.  That is how I used to feel when I started cooking.  By the way, my friends all survived this experience.  Most of them still look forward to my cooking!

I learned early on that there is a great deal of kitchen chemistry that you must understand, to be successful in preparing a meal. As well as an abundance of artisanship in how you serve it. Making good food into an outstanding meal is not just about taking ingredients and tossing them in a pan and onto a plate. Albeit sometimes that technique can be just fine too.  Regardless, it is about using your intuition, learning from your mistakes, and keeping an open mind.  Figuring out which combinations of ingredients work for optimal aroma, flavor, texture and appearance is one of the most rewarding parts of being a home chef. Or a professional one for that matter.

Cooking is also an exercise for your organizational skills, which is such an underrated part of the whole experience. The term used for preparation before cooking is called “mise en place”. It is a French phrase that means “everything in its place”. The process of preparing and organizing all the ingredients and tools needed for a recipe is one of my favorite parts of cooking a meal.  And a secret to the success of most.  If more people would use this step, there would be more people that enjoyed cooking at home.

Today, Instagram and Facebook have made both cooking and eating out, a shareable art form. But eating at a restaurant is only pleasurable from the standpoint of consumption. Yet by cooking at home, you can enjoy both consuming as well as the creative process, and finally the satisfaction of sharing your creation with others. Cooking is such a great way of bringing people together.  And then they can Instagram or Facebook at their discretion. 

For me, cooking now serves as a connection to departed family.  Mainly my mother, my grandmother, my dad and even my mother-in-law. This bonds me with some of my kitchen mentors, and with the past.  There is nothing like it when you make a time-honored, family recipe. For my dad, it was always an organ of some type. Beef heart, tongue, liver, or kidneys.  Cooked slowly for hours.  Always served with fresh bread and sliced onion.  With a side of hot mustard or tabasco.  I can still smell it cooking!  And I still crave these things, as gross or ridiculous as they sound.  Every now and again I must indulge myself and prepare these simple pleasures. I have stopped trying to get my family to enjoy them with me.  Their loss.

The holidays are approaching now, so I have many kitchen adventures ahead.  At Thanksgiving, it will be my grandmother’s dressing, her sauerkraut and pumpkin pie.  As Christmas approaches it will be my mom’s cookies and recreating my Greek mother-in-law’s Grape leaves and pierogies.  All of this elicits fond memories and makes me feel like I am carrying on a family tradition. Something that is becoming lost in today’s hectic, immediate gratification world.

Sadly, today we live in an era where speed and simplicity take precedence. So most prefer a pre-packaged, conveniently shipped, laid at our feet, drive through experience. Between eating at home or eating out, the latter seems like the better, simpler, more exciting choice. This is simply a product of the culture we live in.  In reality, we lose a great deal for what we perceive as a more convenient option. This is tragic.

The most satisfying and stimulating meals I have ever had were homemade.  Now, I must admit, I have been to a few super high-end restaurants, including some with a Michelin Star, that were superb. Meals that are embedded in my memory forever. 

But frankly, most of the best meals I have ever had were conceived and created in my own kitchen.  I say this with a great deal of pride, but also with humility.  They were meals that were prepared and enjoyed while listening to music, talking, laughing, and drinking.  Their excellence was as much a fact that they were served at my table to my wife, my friends, and my family, then in regard to my skills as a chef.

The sense of communal spirit you can create at home, with food that is cooked and shared there, creates an experience that can rarely be duplicated in a restaurant. In a place where you are eating food prepared by someone unknown, under mysterious conditions, with unidentified ingredients. All the while surrounded by strangers in an environment lacking the communal spirit of home.  It’s almost like you’re missing the whole point.

Not that we should forever abandon frozen dinners, pizza deliveries, great bar food, fine dining or even McDonald’s drive-through.  These things have their place.  Their occasion.  Which should be occasionally!  Yet we must not use them to sacrifice the many benefits of a homecooked meal. Something that is well known to improve our moods and give us feelings of immense satisfaction. The sensation you can only get when you've created something tangible that can be enjoyed and shared.  Something that gives you a well-deserved sense of achievement. Something that brings family and friends together to rejoice in life and the joys of eating food together.

So, at the end of the day, it really comes down to this. Cooking is almost like exercise, if you prioritize it and perform it, it works.  It works to make you happier, healthier, and energized. But unlike exercise, you can’t really have a glass of wine on the treadmill!  All joking aside, cooking can be shared.  And when shared, it can make others happy too. I’ll choose cooking over exercise any day!  It’s my nature to like making people smile. To give people pleasure. Preparing a meal for a crowd is a great way to do that.  I also don’t mind getting credit for my creativity and my passion. 

My kids have not really jumped on this bandwagon.  Don’t get me wrong, they like what I cook but they have never really had my passion for anything related to the act of preparing a meal.  So, my hope is that I can leave my enthusiasm with my grandson.  I only have a few years before I need to turn him loose in the kitchen!  If he wants to have the head start that I had anyway.  If I can get him hooked, I am sure he will enjoy it as much as I have done, and maybe he will think of me someday when I am long gone, as he cooks beef tongue.  Ok, maybe that’s pushing it a little!