There’s one big plus to cooking, aside from having something to eat. And it’s that when you do, your house smells like food.
Sauteed onions. Roasted sprouts. Seared pork. A pot of jasmine rice. A slow cooker teeming with chili, the steam slipping out like a secret. An entire tray of bacon, hoisted out of the oven—a complete meal, in and of itself, if you ask me. It’s the smell of food turning into a meal.
This is what it smells like to take care of one’s own needs, to provide for yourself. Because it’s not enough to sleep somewhere. Your home should be more than an address where takeout is delivered. It has to, at least a few times a week, smell like you were busy making something good.
Cooking in my doll’s house-sized kitchen is no easy feat: There not only is no counter space, there is no counter. The sink is not real sink; it looks as if it were designed specifically so that kindergartners could have a place to wash their hands. (Which is in fact what my particular model of sink is most often used for; walk into any elementary school.)
You have to clean dishes as you go because there is no room for dirty ones, and so cooking at home for my is an exercise in efficiency. It’s a pain. I lust for other people’s huge marble islands and cooking stations, sinks so big I could bathe in them.
And yet, my kitchen works, and I’m never so impressed with myself as when the smell of it all fills the air. It surprises even me: Look at that. I can take care of myself.
Being in a city riddled with good restaurants, it’s tempting to just let the professionals handle things, and I do. I enjoy their stunning, considered, review-worthy meals. Or I simply let myself off the hook and lose myself in a big bowl of curry made by the batch.
That’s fine, a lot of the time. There’s something to being responsible for your own sustenance. My friend Kate says that if she hasn’t dirtied a pan in a while, it’s cause for concern. And yet, if we’re being honest, we don’t cook, really—we just set up the conditions for cooking to occur. The heat does the work. All we do is stand by and stir.
One night, I thrilled myself by picking up a pound of clams at Citarellas and putting them in a pot on my own stove. I’d never done that before. Look at me, making a fancy seafood meal. I added butter, wine, parsley, turned up the heat, and waited. In just a few minutes, which is really all it took, there they were: a dozen clams, sweet and steaming, opening their mouths as if to sing.
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