Delights 5: one shift leads to another

I’ve been moving some routines around in the kitchen. I’ve picked out Samin Nosrat as a teacher—in the most intuitive way. I love her cookbooks. They are beautiful and teach me so much and I enjoy them. My friend Sarah told me about her pandemic podcast Home Cooking and it is the light, chatty podcast that I’ve been looking for to balance out my Bible Project and NT Wright. I’ve sat both of her bookcooks down on the counter; they stand in the corner behind the Alexa that plays my cooking music. When I am tempted to piddle on my phone while something is cooking. I open one of them to the marked spot and read. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a textbook, nothing less. There’s so much reading about salt. 

I’m a decent cook. I know that in an apocalyse my responsibility will be to feed people. There will be big pots of soup and beans and homemade bread and a garden in the backyard. Someone else will have to attack zombies and rally the guys and master the element of surprise (did you catch the reference?) I can spatchcock and roast a chicken, bake my own bread, make a menu and then be flexible with it. But I want to grow in my kitchen skills. I want to be an even better cook. I want to know my way around more complicated things. So I’m learning in a way that feels good and keeps me from picking up my phone. 

I’m trying to treat my kitchen more like a restaurant. I believe I first saw this idea on Feelings! (I also loved their idea of being the creative director of your life) We make our own london fogs. I hung the menu inside the pantry door right behind my apron. I wrote down a bakery list: here’s what I plan to bake, not just cook. While I’m making dinner, I’m checking to see if I need to thaw meat or soak beans for the next day. I’m showing up in the kitchen after picking kids up from school to take the first steps toward dinner. Which is really feeding into my desire to eat dinner between 5 and 6 because everyone is calmer and it makes it easier to have conversation and read our Bible more nights than not. Which also leaves us more time to clean the kitchen and still hang out before bed. 

Actions are far reaching. I moved a cookbook to where it’s easily accessible. I said I’m a cook and want to be a better cook. And now we are eating dinner earlier and reading the Bible more consistently at dinner and all because I moved a cookbook? Maybe not all because but it definitely wasn’t apart from that.