My husband and I are foodies. For many years, he has cooked most of the meals and I have been primarily a baker, but we both love to prepare food and as a result own every possible kitchen appliance. While we rarely bother to buy furniture or paint our walls, we spend our money where our mouths are so that our stomachs can appreciate the advantages of food prepared with the help of all the latest gadgets.This year, my husband took a job teaching in Beirut, Lebanon and we moved into faculty housing in a men’s dorm. Instead of cooking on a Viking range with the help of a food processor, a Kitchen Aid standing mixer, and lots of workspace, we now have a two-burner cooktop, an oven, and a small refrigerator-freezer unit. Workspace is limited and we only have a few pots and pans, a couple of mixing bowls, and a few small things we purchased to make cooking a bit easier.
For the last few months, my husband has been too busy grading papers to cook and I’m living in Beirut with not much to do, so I’ve taken on food preparation with a vengeance. Our little kitchen reminds me of my first kitchen in a 9 by 12 foot apartment in Greenwich Village in New York City. That kitchenette shared a wall with the door and had a four burner stove, a refrigerator under the sink, and a couple of shelves above. It was in that kitchen that I first became interested in cooking and baking.
In Beirut, with my vastly reduced workspace and lack of gadgets, cooking has become meditative and I am reminded daily that food tastes better when more care is taken with the preparation. Recently I made batches of Christmas cookies and found that, for the first time in my adult life, they all tasted exactly like the cookies my mother used to make when I was a child.
In my little kitchen in Beirut, I can tend a pot on the stove, wash a dish, and look over my shoulder through a cubby hole window to a partial view of the Mediterranean Sea. All that and delicious food too. Who could ask for more?
LILA
As you now know, my parents are notorious foodies and excellent cooks.
Unlike many mini-foodies, however, I did not grow up eagerly shadowing my parents as they chopped and sautéed and baked. Until college I rarely set foot in the kitchen at all unless it was to steal cookie dough. In fact, I spent most of my childhood scared of fire, knives, noisy appliances, and salmonella. All of the things you might happen upon in a well-stocked kitchen (save the latter, one hopes).
For years my parents not-so-silently worried that I would never learn to cook and would, as a result, fail at adulthood. They did not, however, count on the power of my extremely discerning (read: picky) taste in food. Just as I was not a fan of many of the staple foods of childhood (peanut butter, questionably sourced sandwich meats, American cheese…), none of which ever made an appearance in our kitchen, I was not particularly suited to college style cafeteria dining either. For a while during my Freshman year I was content to survive on candy and cereal but eventually I started craving real food made of real ingredients from real plants and animals.
Finally my desire to eat outgrew my aversion to the kitchen. What began with a desperate attempting to make fresh tomato sauce in a hot pot eventually matured into a stable of meals that I could make using the limited kitchen available to me in college housing.
Now that I am living in a studio apartment in Los Angeles, cooking has become even more important, but learning to cook for one or two people using supermarket-sized quantities of food never ceases to be a challenge. Here’s to trying!
