From the Stovetop, With Love

In my early years as a student, I lived off a steady rotation of three different meals. This was the early days of Instagram, before everyone was flying out five meals for under £5 that target every food group and are also good for the environment. Three meals, plus the standard vegetarian lasagne I’d throw together if I was cooking for a group. None of them were particularly inventive, or required much more skill than tossing a few things in a pot or into the oven and trying to remember to take it out in time.

One sticks to memory, in particular: spinach and ricotta ravioli, tomato and marscapone sauce, and garlic and herb flatbread. Total cost: £3. And that would make two servings. It took about five minutes to prepare and came in as one of the cheapest, quickest and easiest meals I could make. I don’t think I could stomach it anymore – and not just because I’ve since developed a lactose-intolerance.

It was no wonder that every time my parents came to visit, all I really wanted was a massive steak and a pile of vegetables.

Things gradually started to improve. I grew tired of ravioli and moved to an area of the city with a better-stocked supermarket. But the thing that really tipped me into cooking was when I started actively cooking for other people. With someone other than myself to impress, I was want to put more time and thought into what it was I was preparing.

I hosted Thanksgiving dinner a couple of times over those years, in my small Edinburgh flat with the patterned tablecloth. I threw together a curry night for a friend and destroyed a saucepan beyond repair in the process. I discovered my smoke alarm didn’t work by burning the bottom of a pan so badly that I could barely see the length of the corridor. (The very nice, hunky firemen came a week later to fit me a new one).

“Okay, but is it cooked through? I’m really worried it’s not cooked through.” One of my first evenings hosting, Thanksgiving 2015.

But even in all this, as much as I loved to cook for other people, I still considered cooking day-to-day to be a hassle. An inconvenience that took time and energy that I was often lacking by such a point in the day. The joy of a fresh fridge of groceries would last a few days before I was back to facing shelves empty of all but eggs and a wilting half lemon, with no inspiration to start the whole process over again.

My mother likes to say with pride that all of her children can cook, and we can. None quite like my oldest brother, though, who understands flavours in a way I can’t wrap my head around. It’s always been a joy to me to sit with him as he cooks, watching as his mind jumps from place to place. From one half-read recipe in the back of his mind to the memory of a taste on the back of his tongue to what seems just dumb luck. And the final product somehow works, as mad as it may have sounded in theory. The last time I left my brother’s house, he was in the middle of making pork buns for the first time, still in his dressing gown, with flour on his face.

I’d never be able to get my head around cooking as a creative pursuit in such a way – I have my creative pursuits, and those work for my tastes and sentiments. But in recent months, I’ve found myself thinking about cooking in a very different way to how I had in the past.

Since moving to Canada, I have often found myself cooking for people. My first Christmas away from my family was spent with friends here, and I took charge of creating a mostly-vegan Christmas spread, with the encouragement and wine-pouring of my wonderful Canadian family here. As the new year came in, I found gaps of time in between hectic work scheduling to seclude myself to the kitchen with an array of pans and a recipe stuck open on my laptop.

Since settling into a standard schedule at my new job, I found more of a routine and cooking became a weekend activity that I came not to just enjoy, but to look forward to. In the past few months, me and my friends have started a tradition of what I’m calling our family dinners, where I have them over and cook up some something or other. It didn’t seem to matter to me, as it might once have, that I was attempting to make three curries I’d never made before, starting at seven o’clock on a Wednesday evening. They crowd into the kitchen with me, until the onions start to make their eyes water, open cans for me, read out recipe lines to me, and tell me repeatedly that I need to buy some better knives.

I realised that the pleasure I get from cooking for people is, and always has been, as a way of showing love for those you care about. Sitting and watching as my friends sit around me and eat the food I’ve prepared, with smiles and laughter, brings so much joy to my heart.

So, then, if cooking for others was a way of showing love, why so couldn’t it be for myself? I’d always thought of cooking for myself as this tedium, human’s unfortunate need to refuel three times a day. But it could be something more gentle, more caring, not just the necessary motions.

Cooking has become the place where the world goes quiet. It’s a place where I have to think only of the task at hand, where I have no headspace left to worry about everything else whirling around about me. It is a creative outlet, and such work brings me joy, but, for once, it isn’t work.

For a while, drawing filled that space as an outlet with no career-driven goal. But, with drawing, I found myself too often caught up in whether something was good enough, irritatingly perfection-driven to a place that got my head more tangled up in knots than it had been to start with.

Drawing, as an outlet, didn’t last too long.

For my generation, there has become such a trend towards turning our creative outlets and passions into our work; in finding some way to monetise the things we love to do. And as much as it is wonderful to be able to earn a living from doing the things you love, it’s a fast-track path to complete burnout. What is there left for you to allow your mind, body and soul to relax, if all of it feeds back into your work?

It’s certainly not just my generation, and a lot of this attitude comes from my family. I’ve always admonished my dad for not having any kind of outlet outside of his work. He picks up a book to read, and it’s still a book on his subject field.

“But this is what I enjoy,” he would reply, blinking at me uncomprehendingly. “I want to read this book.”

It was an attitude I couldn’t understand for the longest time but, like with much of what my dad does, a path I now tread in a very similar fashion.

I am not now, or ever, going to become a professional cook. I’m not going to become a food blogger, or a food critic, or anything else in the field. I’d like to get to a point where I don’t burn the bottoms of my pans or have sauces exploding across the kitchen but I have no aspiration to mastering the culinary arts. I doubt I’ll ever have a head for flavours in the way my brother does, and that I’ll stick to mostly following a recipe until I lose track and make it up a bit.

When I cook, I cook just for me – or for those I love. Instead of being a draining task for the end of the day, it’s become a lift of positive energy that can turn even the worst of days into something a little brighter.

Psst! A couple of things, ICYMI:

Feeling cheated out on a blog post? Missed a date because my article for Maggie on female leaders in the beauty industry went up that weekend. Read it here.
I’ve set up a second Instagram account for my 35mm photography. Follow it here. Not following my main account? Follow that, too.