Cooking

I don't have many hobbies; I usually spend all my time not committed to family on work, because I love my job.

One thing I have done since I first moved off-campus as a graduate student is cook for myself. I am a fussy eater with strong distastes. The other side of being fussy is that I have strong likes, and it is through cooking that I have found many flavors that I did not know that I liked.

I began with an old Good Housekeeping cookbook given to me by my mother. I pretty soon realized that the salt, butter, cream, and sugar amounts were kind of off-the chart. It was a wonderful procedural guide but I found pretty quickly that I had to revise the recipes for myself, and began to keep a recipe file on 3 x 5 cards.

Throughout graduate school I made a point of asking for specific cookbooks (that I had browsed in bookstores) for birthday and Christmas presents and pretty quickly built up a library. Some were general, some were more specialized on Chinese and vegetarian cuisines.

I've tried to be faithful over the years with mixing new and old recipes in my weekend cooking routine. This has varied according to my income and free time. I also have tried to be faithful about annotating and tweaking my recipe file, finding ways to make the dishes more interesting.

In graduate school I made a point of trying a new herb every couple of weeks or so, amassing dozens very quickly. I lived near a restaurant-supply company and was able to acquire some no-name cooking gear inexpensively. Also in graduate school I was fortunate enough to live near a good meat market and a good produce market. I constantly marvel at what I had access to, one of the boons of living near a university.

In the lonely years when I could go weeks doing nothing but working on my dissertation and my part-time job I made it a ritual to have a nice dinner, salad, side vegetable, good bread, and an inexpensive wine each evening. I built up leftovers in the freezer for the weeknights and tried not to eat the same dish twice in a week.

I made a technical breakthrough a few years ago when I first bought an app (ChefTap) that would scan websites for recipes and store and display them for me. It has become far quicker and easier to go from the concept of a dish to Googling and finding several recipes for it to downloading one to cooking it.

Now that I am 61 my vision is weaker and my hands are losing their strength and stamina in most contexts. I don't think twice about my hands when cooking, so some of that is psychosomatic; my main issue is my back if I stand too long; I do try to do more prolonged slicing and dicing while sitting.

In the summer of 2021 I was recovering from knee surgery and I made it a goal to do something new with cooking. I decided that as much as I enjoy eating at Indian restaurants I didn't cook nearly enough of Indian recipes. I researched ones that looked appealing online until my knee could support me and I spent several months cooking nothing for my family but Indian recipes. They still seem to love me.

I know that age is catching up with me, and I will need to modify what I cook to match my weaknesses, someday giving it up. But it's been a good four decades and I am very grateful.