Here we go, life.
I had been looking to expand my cooking repertoire for some time now and wasn't sure where to look. Fortunately, I came across a book title while listening to a podcast while in San Diego this summer. The book is called, "Midnight Chicken" by Ella Risbridger. The speakers in the podcast gushed about the beauty of the prose of the author. This was no ordinary recipe book, but a book to fall back in love with life and the world.
This - this collection of recipes - is the story of how I learned to manage again: a kind of guidebook for falling back in love with the world, a how-to of weathering storms and finding your pattern and living, really living."
It took forever for this book to come to me. I remember coming back to my apartment seeing a pink slip at the door from USPS saying that "they missed me." (i.e. No one was present during the delivery and so I would either need to have it redelivered or picked up at their branch). No!!! The USPS in my neighborhood had such a bad reputation in terms of long lines and poor service. I tried their redelivery service but it didn't work. By then, I only had two days before my book was scheduled to be delivered back to the sender. I decided to bite the bullet, wake up early, and pick up my book.
Despite some confusion as to which USPS branch to go to, the package landed safely on my hands.
I opened the package on the subway station and it was beautiful. As I clutched the hardcover book when the train arrived, I felt I had a piece of magic in my hands.
More accurately, the Tall Man taught me to cook, or more accurately still, he taught me that cooking was something I wanted to do. He taught me to enjoy cooking, to delight in cooking, to use cooking as a kind of framework of joy on which you could hang your day. A breakfast worth getting out of bed for. Second breakfast. Elevenses. Lunch. Afternoon tea. Dinner as glorious reward for a day done well, or consolation for a day gone badly, or just a plain old celebration of still being there, of having survived another one. Supper. A midnight feast.
"I love to cook because it's all about intuition and invention, about looking deep into the stew and trying to predict what it might want and need."
I read from the book every night before I go to bed and it calms me down. In a way, the book provides a map to a life I want: rich, warm, hopefully with some magical company. When I am having a dull or a rough day, cooking dinner grounds, re-centers and comforts me (the cat helps, too). I am hoping that this book will give me a set of clues as to how to continue to rebuild my life, according to my terms, moving forward.
"There is a moral here, maybe: there will always be a time when you want more than toast; there will always come a time when you remember that life had something else in it besides crying. Woman cannot live by toast alone - and although it might feel, at some points in your life, as though the effort to make anything else might kill you, that will not last. There will be another feeling. You will wake up one morning and remember other things: the ripe sharp-sweet burst of a good tomato; the kick of a chilli; the salty, meaty bite of an anchovy. Nutrients. Vitamins. Colours."