I’ve been sick for some days. A basic cold, the kind that, had I anywhere I had to be, I still would have gone, but since I had no place to be, I stayed in bed for two days. But today I ventured out the house. I put on proper clothes, and I spent some time in front the mirror putting on eyeliner and mascara. These are not things I do, but I did them. It felt right. Then I went to a cafe where I ate a macaroon and drank an iced coffee and wrote letters and read some of a novel. And then I put the novel down and looked up and decided I had a craving to cook good food.
Nota Bene:
Times I’ve had cravings to cook, until this moment: 0
Times I expect I’ll have a craving to cook in the future: 0 (This is a departure from a younger, more naive me, who would have assumed that one craving to cook food would be the first of many cravings to cook food. I now see such cravings as lone and lovely events, and not the harkening of some new era in which one is a different, better person.)
But it was still to be determined: was this craving to be a small moment that would pass, or was it to be realized? I let it sit for a second, and then I decided to go with it. I looked up recipes and settled on:
1. raw tuscan kale salad from 101 Cookbooks (put in my head from a recent post on The Blue Hour)
2. sliced mushrooms with mozzerella and fresh thyme, from Orangette (chosen from her list of recipes for its minimal ingredients and required skill).
Shopping list in hand (kale, mushrooms, mozz, lemon) I went to the market and spent an hour making important decisions like: is better to buy organic kale from across the country or conventional kale from an hour away? I also bought good olive oil, pears, bananas, chickpeas, capers, and one butternut squash, in case the cooking trend lasted more than one afternoon. I spent $46.
Once home, I unpacked my small bag. I put on a Gillian Welch Pandora station, that to this moment, however many hours later (three), continues to be incredibly pleasing (really, I cannot recommend it enough). I pulled up the recipes on my laptop. I turned on enough lights to see but not so many as to be clinical. I washed the kale. I rolled it in a dish towel to dry. And then I paused.
I was preparing a meal of raw ingredients for myself. No one would be coming home to eat it with me, or even to see me eating it. No one would be dropping by to see what I was doing, and be answered with, “oh, preparing raw tuscan kale salad.” Not only would my efforts not be complimented, they wouldn’t even be noticed. Was it worth it? I called a friend. I listened to him update about his love affairs (snooze, really) for awhile and then mentioned I was about to make raw tuscan kale salad. Someone had to know. He seemed impressed (he certainly wasn’t making raw tuscan kale salad). It was enough for me. I hung up, and got on with it.
I chopped the kale and crushed the garlic and made the bread crumbs. The sun was setting and it started to pour rain, and I took a moment to stand on the back porch and look at the light. It was yellow, but in a nice way, not that scary way that looks like a thousand tornadoes are about to reach down. I saw a rainbow, but wished I didn’t; I felt prosaic. Then I walked into the yard in the rain to collect the fresh thyme, and found that the thyme was dried and dead from neglect. “Shit.” I snuck into the neighbor’s yard to see if they had thyme. They did not. “Oh well.”
Back inside, I used extra black paper instead of the thyme. I briefly considered cleaning off the table and lighting a candle for my meal, but: I’d had a craving, not a personality overhaul. I pushed aside some of the mess to make room for my plate, and I sat in front of my computer and read blogs and ate my meal. After I was done eating, I looked up how to poach a pear, because, well, wouldn’t that be something? To poach a pear for myself? After having made dinner for myself? But: no. No candles, no poached pears. Today, kale salad. Tomorrow, peanut butter out of the jar and pears, raw. And that’s okay.
