Time, Incarnate: A Musing on Food

            This week, I have not cooked as much, nor felt like I had as much time or energy. In this, I realize that part of what I like about cooking is the time it takes and the locationality it requires. 

You can’t cook a good meal while you are driving down Kellogg with your hair on fire to do 10,000 errands. Cooking takes the time it will take. Cooking is a scientific endeavor; cutting foods and heating them in various ways to certain temperatures, carmelization, the blending together of flavors… the science demands the time for the process to occur. 

Cooking also requires so much equipment, SO many different things that it can’t be done on the fly. It has to be done in a certain space, and it helps to have that space be one that is fully stocked with all the equipment needed. Home. 

Cooking requires time and home-ness. 

I love and need time and home-ness. This is part of what cooking gives me. This is part of what I loved so very much about making the mujadara; it took excessive amounts of time to cook that many onions down into a caramelized thing of beauty that just sang. 

I loved the mujadara because of the adventure of trying to cook something new, the comforting blend of sweet and salty flavors, and the process it took to get the onions, lentils, and rice to make their beautiful symphony. 

Cooking is time, incarnate. 

This is part of the heresy of convenience foods. People always complain about fast food and convenience food because of the amount of sodium or lack of vitamins, the sheer amount of fat and sugar that it takes to keep modern American tastebuds coming back for more. And those are all valid criticisms. 

But an even more egregious offense of the modern food industry—just the phrase “food industry” says it—is that it removes us from the scientific time it takes to prepare nourishment, and it removes us from home, or gives us less requisite time there. 

I have not spent enough time at home, cooking, to begin to explore the myriad gifts that I believe are here for me, for anyone who will take the interior journey. But I believe there are gifts to be had. 

As the winter begins, the dark and cold call me to shelter. May I spend this winter taking time in my home, making it my primary locationality, cooking. May I begin to find the gifts of time, incarnate.