Last night, I had a weird dream that I woke up with a strange medical condition. Something doctors had never seen. I had permanently lost my appetite.
It was like the Matrix, the same day kept repeating again and again, and still no appetite. I felt physical hunger but zero attraction to food. I didn’t care about flavor, and the worst, I had absolutely no desire to cook. Food had become purely fuel to me. I could have taken a complete daily “pellet” and been fine. And cooking? It felt like too much effort and work. Help!
Obviously, this was an anxiety dream (or nightmare). I found myself fretting, wondering what to do. Holy shit. Life was over as I knew it. I could no longer be a foodie because I didn’t care about food. Nor a cook. As my mind spiraled downward, I thought, this is the end of my career! However, what most freaked me out: “How the heck am I going to occupy my thoughts all day long?”
Before losing my appetite, the entire fabric of my day revolved around food. Shopping for it; preparing it; planning meals and parties; reading about it in books, on blogs; watching it on TV. It was the central axis for understanding the world. The vital blood. My passion.
In my dream, I tossed and turned, paced, and tried to resolve why it was so hard to occupy my mind with something else. Come on, Liz, just find another interest. Music? Sports? Marketing? Something! I was going crazy with boredom, and then suddenly I realized why.
As foodies, food lovers, chefs, and cooks, there is a whole process in cooking that is deeply soul-satisfying. Cooking takes you entirely through the creative process from start to finish in a relative condensed period of time. That same process, as in all of creation, can be applied to starting and growing a business; having a baby; training for a marathon; any and all endeavors in life although usually these things take much longer and so we don’t sense there is a beginning and end point at times.
So what is that creative process when applied to cooking that makes it so sticky, so loveable, so satisfying? I probed and probed this question in this dream that seemed to never end, and by the minute caused more anxiety as to what I would do with myself.
1. The spark of desire: Everything starts with the flicker of an idea. A seed. In cooking, sometimes dishes are born out of a vacuum, a craving, a sudden flashback to a childhood memory, flipping through a cookbook, or even a burning science question. Like all great ideas, when they hit hard, you know it. Yesssss. You feel it. And well, to grow the seed, you have to care for it and develop it.
2. Visualization: As you develop your idea, the mind starts to think in pictures. You have a vision. Cooking is so sensual that most, if not all cooks, have the capacity to read a recipe, understand it, AND get an imaginary taste and texture sensation in the mouth. Visualization? You bet. You are imagining and experiencing the dish before it exists. Before any pot, pan, or knife has been taken out and dirtied. This is the part where you can innovate, make it your own, and in my opinion, is the hallmark of understanding how to put together a larger menu for a dinner. You orchestrate the final result in your mind and then essentially work backwards and do the necessary steps to get the desired results.
3. Action and Planning: I don’t know about you but most of my day looks like this: at breakfast I plan dinner. Shopping at the market I resolve the lunch menu. One humble ingredient like celery can inspire me and create a domino effect that produces an impromptu cooking project. Now that I have celery, I should make more stock. Oh it’s cold, and celery goes in lentil soup, how yummy would that be for tomorrow. You see how a cook’s mind works. Plus, most cooks are foragers and love rumaging around markets, food shops, and ethnic haunts looking for strange and new ingredients. It makes you feel like a kid on a scavenger hunt. The planning is part of the fun.
4. Alquimia/Taking Shape: At this point in the process, all the material has been procured, so now the magic really happens. It is probably my favorite part. I love to stack all the ingredients on the counter to visually take them in before I transform them. As I progress in the recipe(s), I love seeing how the primary ingredients join together to form the dish, a pie, a sauce. It’s chemistry. It’s physics. A dash of alquimia. And most definitely, a good cook knows and feels her ingredients—always with room to play a little and have fun. Tweak. Taste. Toil. Bubble. In that, your feelings and usually a lot of love, get mixed up in the flour and sugar, or marinated with the beef. Just like Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
5. Final results: The final product, the fruit of the recipe, is a not unlike a symphony. It is the culmination of the process. The manifestation of the image and seed planted in the cook’s mind. Flavors and textures meld together to create sensations and cause a total experience. When I am in sync in the kitchen, time stands still, and the resulting meal is harmonious, long, with carefully crafted flavors and perfect textures. When I am in a pinch at lunch time, hungry and with deadlines, even a simple seared chicken breast, can be staccato. The flavor falls short. Maybe it is a little chewy since I had the heat too high. I cared less–and it showed.
And then it hit me, dreaming still. Waking up with no appetite was essentially losing my life inspiration. My juice. My mojo. From start to finish in cooking, I give of myself and breathe in inspiration from my own work. There’s a larger purpose and connection behind it.
In my dream, the alarm went off in three very loud beeps. As I laid there and slowly came back to consciousness, I started to fantasize about toast and natural peanut butter with soy milk for breakfast. No, maybe I wanted a veggie goat cheese omelette. Better yet, muesli and yogurt.
I smiled. Thank God. It had only been a nightmare. My appetite was still in tact and kicking.
