I love to cook. In the kitchen I can silence all the alarm bells of daily stress in my life and give myself over completely to the task at hand. In this age of "talking things out" and "sharing our feelings" we've lost touch with the simple (and effective) therapy of kneading the hell out of some bread dough!
I don't claim to be very good. (Ahhh...another lesson learned in the kitchen: humility!) I've only really embraced cooking over the last three to four years. It began when I discovered that the apartment I lived in in West Virginia was walking distance from an amazing indoor/outdoor farmer's market. I soon fell in love with the place and spent hours each Saturday picking over the local produce and browsing the wine shop, butcher's counter, and fish monger's stall. Due to the highly stressful, 60-hour-per-week job I had then, all my time hanging out at the market did not translate into much extra time in the kitchen--I did develop a love for fresh, local ingredients, though!
Fast forward to the birth of my first child. I took twelve weeks of maternity leave and as Lacey and I settled into a routine I found I had more time to spend cooking. I picked up a cookbook full of exotic recipes and I was unstoppable! I'm sure Lacey's father would've liked to come home some night from work to find out we were having meatloaf or spaghetti for dinner. I wasn't interested in the traditional at this point--it was chicken tikki masala or spanakopita for us every night!
Over the next couple of years several things began to re-shape the way I cooked. I returned to work and it was no longer practical to cook international dishes each night that always required a trip to the grocery for special ingredients. Lacey began eating solid foods and I decided to make her babyfood from fresh, steamed, and pureed produce. In her interest, I began to think a lot more about basic nutrition. Most recently, I lost my job and gave birth to my second daughter. I found myself having to stretch my food dollar (and all my dollars, for that matter) farther than I had in quite a few years, but without giving up on the high standards I now harbored for my childrens' nutrition. I found the best way to do this was to simply cook more from scratch.
I'll get more into the specific benefits in other posts, but cooking from scratch is much more economical than buying prepared, processed food at the grocery AND it helps reduce or eliminate from your diet evil elements in processed food like high fructose corn syrup--which gives us the long, unnatural shelf life we love in convenience foods, but which also makes and keeps us fat!
What I love most about cooking from scratch isn't all the nutritional, economical, environmental, and political reasons (I'll get into those last two later), its the common sense element. In my humble opinion, what the hell good are you as a cook if you can whip up a perfectly creamy risotto, but can't make a basic loaf of bread?
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2 comments:
So post me a somewhat simple bread reciepe! ( something I cant ruin easily) Ive never made anything but Banana and other fruit breads. I woud like to be able to make something we can actually eat off of!
I'll probably make bread this weekend...I'll post then.
All bread recipies are simple...they are all basically flour, yeast, water, sugar, salt or some variation of these. I'll post about what it takes to make a good loaf. I'm forever perfecting mine...its a learning proccess!
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