kitchen

kitchen
Originally uploaded by madabandon.

I love to cook and I especially love to cook for people who love to eat good food. I think I have serious talent for cooking; both my maternal grandmother and my mother were excellent cooks and I learned a lot just from watching them. I read about food and used to read cookbooks voraciously. I never use recipes but draw upon them for ideas. And one of my best college friends, an old housemate, is now a very successful chef in NYC, and I learned a lot from him. I can figure out how to make most things that I eat in restaurants, unless it involves some super-arcane technique. I guess I have a good imagination for flavor and how flavors combine. I just like the whole process of cooking. It's cool to be able to conceive of something and execute it in such an immediate way, so different than composing.

Anyway the produce at the greenmarkets these days is amazing, perfect even. I bought a huge bunch of mustard greens and fresh garlic and was just preparing them; now they will cook for a long time and rest, and by evening they will be awesome. I was thinking while cooking that if my mom were still alive she and I would probably get along quite well, and I would love to cook these for her. And I felt her presence, then, in me, in a really wonderful way.