Some things aren't true until you say them...

10.28.2008 - 11:41 p.m.

So in the interest of saving some money (and having a non-internet-based hobby) I've been doing a lot of cooking lately. Some of it has been baking, and some of it has been your standard stovetop cooking, but most of it has been using the crock pot.

I'm enjoying myself, overall. I like browsing for recipes, either in the cookbooks I have, or on the internet.(Criteria: looks worse for you than it is, is mostly dead cow, and does not contain mushrooms, which meatitarian husband believes are out to get him.)(Alternative criteria: looks yummy, involves more vegetable than animal, is perhaps a soup I won't have to share with him anyway.)

I like pulling out all the ingredients for the night's efforts, picking some music, then falling into a zen state of chopping and measuring and heating. It doesn't take long, even on the worse, most scatterbrained days. And the more I do it, the more I add secondary tasks, baking pumpkin muffins while I cook chicken for the alfredo, checking the pasta between trips to wash asparagus in the sink. It is a dance, an ever-changing rhythm with echoes going back through a childhood in one of my mother's oversized aprons.

My favorite of the aprons was a dark blue one that said, in white letters "A collision at sea can ruin your entire day." Possibly because it was my mother's favorite, too, but more likely because to this day, I have no idea what to make of that quote.

I am having particular fun with the crock pot, because the book of recipes I have for it is, shall we say, flawed. Everything comes out perfectly edible, certainly... but nothing is quite perfectly yummy. So each time, I find myself making notes in the margins: "Try two cups of broth instead of one." "This does not need to cook so long." "Less salt than it says." Today, I'm making a pot roast that conflates two recipes, just because I could, so there.

Let the echoes of utensils, and pots, and timers carry on. It is no matter that I've no apprentice just yet.

-stonebridge

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