Why I Cook

This excerpt from "A Homemade Life" by Molly Wizenberg perfectly summed up why I love being in the kitchen:

When I walk into my kitchen today, I am not alone.  Whether we know it or not, none of us is.  We bring fathers and mothers and kitchen tables, and every meal we have ever eaten.  Food is never just food.  It's also a way of getting at something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be...  When I walk into my kitchen today, I bring all of this with me.  Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things.  I like the way the knife claps when it meets the cutting board.  I like the haze of sweet air that hovers over a hot cake as it sits, cooling, on the counter.  I like the way a strip of orange peel looks on an empty plate.  But what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall.  When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that's what we're often responding to: that something else behind the fork or spoon, the familiar story that food tells.  


I love being in the kitchen because I love to create, I love to eat what I create, and I love cooking for family and friends.  But more than that, I love where cooking takes me.  It takes me back to my Gram A's kitchen, spreading soft butter on fresh white bread for an afternoon snack.  Back to learning how to slide hot cookies off the pan onto old paper bags to cool.  To hearing my mom tell me the right proportions of butter, milk, and salt to put into the mashed potatoes.  Back to family dinners every Sunday.  Cooking always reminds me of the love I grew up with, and the love I continue to be blessed with.