Kitchen as home

It's taken me a long time to absorb that one of my major pleasures is cooking. Not cooking as in coming up with a meal two or three times a day -- I still wouldn't really like that. But I like putting together meals now that we have evolved (or devolved?) into people who will just as easily go out for a bite than to eat at home. And especially since I no longer live under the pressure to provide meat at every meal! Gosh it takes a long time to un-train a man from the eating assumptions he grew up with.

So now that it's not an expectation, as in "When are we going to have dinner," which has turned into the more recent "Do you have anything in mind for dinner," I find it enjoyable to make up a meal. The reason it's enjoyable is that I've done the work beforehand, either by shopping for the quick-to-fix, or by noodling around in the kitchen and cooking in bulk -- soup, roasted vegetables, stuff like that -- so that there are things on hand. It's the noodling around, or the puttering, that I've just now recognized as parallel to my spouse's puttering in the garden. It's meditative.

And I have a nice kitchen here in Avocado Land. Plenty of counter space, almost enough cupboard space (is there ever enough?) and the freaking big refrigerator of my dreams with a large freezer drawer on the bottom. For the last couple of years we've also had food from our own garden, which Mike produced with his own puttering (which often looked like hard work). But this year he's taking a break. The garden is two miles away, and always needs water (we are in Southern California, remember?), and takes too much of his time away from his other love, painting. He'll do herbs in pots here at the condo instead.

So we're going to try something new to us -- CSA, or Consumer Supported Agriculture. I know a lot of people do this -- it's very cool -- but I couldn't make use of it when we had a garden. So, we'll pay for a quarter of a year at a time, and get a box of whatever is in season, weekly or bi-weekly. We'll start with bi-weekly and see how it goes. I like the idea of planning meals depending on what shows up in our box.

Just another part of the food game.