Cooking

My relationship with cooking has changed a lot through the years – as also my relationship to work, ambition, family, etc; guess that’s what comes from growing older.
As a child, cooking was something women did, like my mother and grandmother. Then my sisters, possessed of more modern and feminist ideas, tried to make me cook, with very poor results – I remember trying to cook rice and getting a kind of watery soup, or to fry potatoes and having to run away from the kitchen as a kind of Krakatoa explosion took place over the stove because I poured the potatoes with water on the boiling oil. Not exactly very auspicious beginnings.
Anyway, eventually I became able to cook some basic food staples, from my girlfriend, then wife, I learned to cook a decent grilled fish and a few other dishes. But still I considered it a necessary but boring domestic chore.
The first time I took some pleasure from cooking it was when my wife was studying for her specialty exam, and I started cooking for her and the friend that used to study with her, I tried new recipes and got really pleased to provide them some tasty food. It was the first time I had some real pleasure from cooking, seeing the girls enjoying what I had prepared for them.
Later, as a single parent, cooking became a necessity – the children had to be fed dinner every day, and I had to provide it. So I tried to make it fun, and created a routine: I had all these recipe books from every country I visited, and we chose every evening a recipe from a different book for the next day, we made a list of the ingredients, then we bought them at the supermarket and we cooked the selected recipe. And it really worked; not only we had lots of fun and bonding moments, as one of my children became a very good cook.
And now I love cooking, I love to gather my family and close friends every weekend for dinner, and to cook for the Middle Eastern themed café my daughters and I recently opened. Cooking became an extremely pleasurable and soothing activity, from choosing recipes to cutting vegetables and selecting spices.
But most of all, I enjoy the warm feeling of my friends eating what I cooked, chatting and laughing around the dinner table. That’s the real pleasure of cooking, to create something that pleases one’s friends, that makes us feel connected and happy.