Turn, Turn, Turn

To everything there is a season

Thank you Byrds. And Ecclesiastes.

I may be the only person in the world to turn of The Great British Baking Show because I was too stressed to watch. To me, cooking=angst. Cooking is so stressful. Cooking meaning, food prep of any kind.

I come from a true melting pot of cooking tradition. My mother is Canadian and fed us Johnny Cake. Her mother grew up with farm cooking, but joined the great casserole brigade that began in the 1950s and continued until about fifteen years ago. Her father liked recipes from his Romanian heritage and from the Ukranians that lived around them in Saskatewan, as well as from the Native Americans that he grew up among. We still make his version of Bannock.

My father is American. His mother came from an upper-middle class Virginia family with Idahoan roots. Jello salads, fancy grapefruit slush, cucumber sandwiches. His father was a true Southern. A hunter who made his kids eat frog legs and liked his food fried. He once told me “You’re not a Harper if you don’t like grits.”

I have no true cooking style. I try everything, which has made me a jack of all trades, master of none, except for beans and tortillas. I can roll those things nice and tight, thanks to the wisdom my mother passed to me learned from her teenage job at Taco Time.

Last year I read, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, from which I gained awareness that I have no identifiable food culture. This was brought home to me today as I read The Best Cook in the World, which is about southern cooking. My lack of monoculture is not just from my family history, but it’s compounded by the fact that we import food from everywhere, all times of the year. There is simply too much variety. Boundaries produce creativity and we do not have food boundaries.

It’s not all bad, but it is what it is.

And what it is, is: I don’t feel defined by the food I eat. It doesn’t feel meaningful to me. It is a daily to-do. And not just that, and this is my second Very Important Reason for talking about cooking, it is a chore with a DEADLINE.

I despise deadlines.

I mean, most people do because work. Here and there they can be a good thing. In moderation. A deadline is extremely motivational.

But the thing is, I am motivated already. This is something I’ve learned about myself since getting serious about writing. I originally thought about applying to a Creative Writing MFA program but I felt strongly that I should NOT do it. So I set about learning to write on my own. It’s not been an easy path, but it is a very rewarding one. Six years of focus into it and I haven’t quit yet

In school, everything had a deadline. Every. Single. Thing. This stressed me out a lot. Like, it was a problem. Anxiety. Daily tears. The works. Looking back, I can see that I was just a motivated kid who took deadlines way too seriously. I was already going to learn the material because I was motivated to learn. The deadlines weren’t really for me, they were a by-product of en-masse learning. Public school has its perks, but deadlines are not one of them.

*Side note: My mother offered to homeschool me but I declined. I mostly regret this.

I love writing on my own because I can go at my own pace. I plan to self publish simply because I do not want the pressure of traditional publishing with deadlines and such. I’m motivated. I love this stuff.

*Side note: Last night I couldn’t fall asleep so I got up and outlined my story for thirty minutes. For fun.

A friend today told me about her life on a farm. She told me about how it took a couple of years to adjust to living on a seasonal schedule. She told me how she likes to make homemade soap, but only has time in February. She plants a huge garden, and prep for it has to happen in March. Everything has a time and season. “But,” she said, “if I don’t get to it in February, it’s fine. If I don’t get the garden in on time, I don’t beat myself up about it. I can always go to the store.” I found this REMARKABLE. Her life has deadlines, but she doesn’t take them too seriously.

I’m going to take a look at my cooking aversion. Maybe dinner has to be on the table by six, and maybe I’ll fail at that. Or I’ll make the deadline but produce an inferior product. There’s always the store. There’s always beans and tortillas.