Beginning something...
Today I did a preparing, but not an eating. As in, the meal I wanted to cook didn’t fit into the day (or leftovers) I had planned, so I’ve put together the most complex aspect and am going to put it on a plate for consumption (not that one) tomorrow, so get ready for some descriptions of a Cannellini Beany Melt in the near future.
I also read some of the book! good girl, petting
I’ve highlighted the word “intuition” in the phrase “hone your skills and intuition” from the inside of the front cover. Then I skipped a load of pages and went to “How To Use This Book”. I haven’t really gone into why this cookbook is the one I’ve used as a structure for my own creative endeavours - I’m much better known for preparing something sumptuous from a Nigella book (and count as a favoured memory going with a friend to seeing her speak) - and I intend for that to become clearer the more time I spend with it. Honestly, I could have chosen cleaning or walks or films or episodes of Murder, She Wrote as the base to get me going, but there’s aspiration in cooking from Start Here.
This aspiration comes in different forms. Yes, I would love, love, love to live a life where every meal I produce is pretty. I would love to potter around Brooklyn examining the rhubarb and going to restaurant openings because I know the people or want to check out how they’ve prepared the hake. I want to live in the vibrancy of such a pretty book. I’d also love to be as knowledgeable as Sohla El-Waylly seems to be. And she does seem knowledgeable, but in that cool expert way: “Yeah, I know a lot, but it’s okay if I’m wrong”. She knows, I believe, because she has made those mistakes. And she’s not embarrassed that you’re making the same ones. But this book, it’s a shortcut.
I need to examine why, but there is a sense of let’s-find-out-together in her recipes, in her videos, an adventurousness I aspire to.
Here now, is a moment. I’m caught up. I want to keep writing about this - right now. I want to start looking into it all - first looking within, how all of this is structured for me, then looking at evidence - where is it written, said, how is it written, said? I want to reinterpret it all for myself - lay the new knowledge on the perceptions I had - does it all stand up? Is she really presenting this, or am I placing too much on a human I have never met?
But.
But, I also did lots today.
It’s getting on to seven, and that’s not late, but I do want to do a short workout before dinner. And I no longer like eating late. And I could delve in, and have dinner made for me and left warming in the oven (or more likely cooling to be reheated, or more, more likely, brought to me at my desk). I am tempted - to do the thing I roll my eyes at - to throw myself into the flow and stay up late and send this off at midnight.
But.
There is a twinge in my back, and there is a pain in my hip resurfacing after weeks of it being calmed. If I want those things (just my body, what I use to live and stuff) to be kept at bay, then I need to actually keep them at bay.
I need to do the work. The slow, consistent work of stretching certain muscles; of eating early enough that I can chill out before bed; of spending some time not whirring mentally; of not acting as if this - or any single pursuit - is my one and all.
I don’t want to have a one and all. I want all, one by one.
So, tomorrow (probably), I’ll write more about Sohla, and Game Plans, and what I cooked and ate. Today is just preparing.
