Not mood. Food. Here is what’s waiting for me in the office fridge:

Wizened butt of cucumber (1)
Middle-aged baby carrots (approx. 20)
Exploding with whole grains bread (excessive)
Tofurky beer brat, “made with Full Sail Ale!” (1)
Mustard (unequal to the task)

There it sits, too discouraging to eat, until my hunger pangs catch up to discouraging and jog on past to dismaying. (In 1995, my hunger pangs dug in at despairing for a whole month. I was backpacking through China and ate only bao, white rabbit candy, and McVitties tea biscuits.) Anyway, I’ve been thinking about food a lot lately, and beauty products and procedures, and yoga and massages, and jogging vs. dog walking, and all the things you can do for yourself that straddle the line between self-care and self-indulgence, and ok, triple line, self-punishment. That cucumber falls into only the latter category, I know, but I’ve been eating very well the last several months, home-cooked, fresh, tasty food, food it never would have occured to me to prepare for myself. Now, by contrast, my own cooking habits seem pitiful and confined and mostly about arranging: oh, here’s a breadish thing and a meatish thing and a vegetable-looking thing that can go on a plate together. Bon appetit!

I didn’t know what it meant to know how to cook. Being good at cooking was like faith to me, something other people had that I occasionally felt a longing for and mostly wasn’t all that interested in except for the art it produced over the centuries and that, if I really thought about it, seemed to involve equal parts terror and magic. But now I’m seeing that cooking is about imagination, and alchemy (cauliflower becomes palatable through the addition of garlic and anchovies,  bad mood becomes good through rituals of chopping, wine, steam), and risk-taking, and telling the squash pasta recipe, that’s whack! No way am I matchsticking the squash! See, if it was just me, I’d matchstick the squash, and I’d hate it, and that would be my cooking experiment for the decade.

I want to learn how to cook for the same reason I want it to be ok to walk instead of jog, or jog instead of walk, to wrinkle without smoothing, to get a massage without thinking I don’t deserve a massage because I don’t manipulate a war horse puppet for two hours every night on stage at the National Theatre (people do). I think cooking is a way to be free, and I think slathering mustard on soy dogs is a way to sidestep the hard work of deciding what you really want. And sometimes, of course, what you really want is for someone to take all that off the table and put a bowl full of gold in its place.