Last night, I hosted my dear friend and culinary mentor, Alison, for dinner. I very purposely kept the menu very simple and only made dishes I’d made multiple times. Should have been a piece of cake. AGAIN, everything was good but not great. I found it less upsetting overall because, well, she’s not my mom, and I guess I care (slightly) less about impressing her.
So, the menu: I served two phenomenal cheeses with sliced baguette. Frankly, I think we both would have been satisfied with just wine and these cheeses: Pierre Robert, an incredibly rich, flavorful triple-crème cow’s milk cheese from France and Truffle Tremor, a ripened goat’s milk cheese laced with bits of truffle and made by Cypress Grove in California. I chose well! Next, we had my favorite and easy roasted salmon with lemon relish from Great Food Fast. I’ve made this at least three other times for guests. Lastly, I whipped up some dark chocolate fondue and served it with pound cake cubes (from Whole Foods), pretzels, organic strawberries, bananas and graham crackers.
So, how could things possibly go awry? My salmon was overcooked and dry, I inexplicably didn’t have enough relish to go around and, hours later, found the toasted pine nuts for the salmon still sitting in the toaster oven.
Now, I certainly wasn’t agonizing about these things. But I did go to bed wondering, “why?”—and, suddenly, an epiphany.
I cook to be quiet, to feel calm, to be alone. In the Myers-Briggs personality test, I am almost entirely “E,” as in extroverted. I love to chit chat, hate to be alone, and am, to be honest, wildly uncomfortable with an idle mind. In fact (and this is a little secret), I am incapable of just being still even for the five minutes it takes Ben to get ready for bed before we go to sleep. I have to read or do puzzles. I’m not sure quite why, but I am really, really uneasy with stillness and quiet. Not a Zen bone in my body. Or so I thought.
What I realized last night is that, while I love to plan meals, choose special foods that I know will please my guests, set the table with fresh linens and flowers, I really don’t like to entertain. Actually, that’s not it at all. I love to have people over, love to sit and talk for hours over wine. It’s just that what I love about cooking, and, what I probably don’t find in other aspects of my life, is lost when I’m cooking for others.
Of course, every day I’m cooking for two (and soon three) others. But, when we met, Ben ate two things: spaghetti and turkey burgers. And, while she has a phenomenal palate, Sophia is still a four-year-old. And Joseph? Well, he still thinks that his fingers are the tastiest treat. While they are, technically, an audience, I feel no pressure cooking for my family. I figure they’ll be happy with whatever I make.
A lot of why I like to cook, and why I put so much time and energy into it, is that when I’m alone in the kitchen, my mind is still while my body is at work. I like to just follow the directions and groove on the process (I’m very process-oriented). I’m sure that, while I was making dinner for Alison last night, we were gabbing a mile a minute and I forgot to pay attention to timing, quantities, garnishes.
Of course, I’m not going to stop entertaining the people I love, and I’m surely going to continue to feel distracted when I have a favorite guest sitting at the counter while I cook. I suppose, then, that I will have to make peace with the fact that, ironically, my best cooking will be my that which I do just for myself.
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