Cooking Bold and Fearless

Thanks for reading/caring about/sympathizing with my Joy of Cooking post last week. I'm really just scratching the surface of a much larger issue pertaining to mental load and traditional gender roles. I talk about this stuff all the time with my girlfriends, but I should also make it clear that I have it good - like, really good. I have been societally trained to worry about the stuff I worry about, but I have a partner who shares these household tasks more equally than a lot of men I know. On some weeks, I'm pretty sure it's lopsided toward him doing more of the work. More than that, he doesn't make a big deal out of it. I'm trying to take on his chill attitude and not take it for granted.

Coincidentally, a couple days after my blog post, this essay came out: It's So Much More Than Cooking. It captures the sentiment I was feeling at the time, and it continued to resonate with my own questions of Why do women care about this stuff so much? Can change happen if we stop caring about the stuff we're trained to care about? Is that OK? We each have to decide what that looks like. I did have an interesting moment last week when I personally experienced what I've teased Joel about for years in having "fridge eyes," i.e., not knowing that we had a particular ingredient in the fridge - "If you'd only look, you'd see it," I'd say in a very smarty-pants way. Turns out, when you don't buy the groceries, fridge eyes is real. 

Also, I had a delightful moment last weekend when I had the opportunity to make myself a baked potato and Joel had a burrito. We ate our respective dinners together on the couch while we watched a movie and it was bliss, I tell you. 

All this is to say I'm temporarily excited about a new cooking project I'm planning to undertake this fall. I started this blog to highlight ways to breathe new life into old things, and this project does exactly that: I'm taking old cookbooks I've collected over the years and am testing their recipes. I'm talking about ones that may call for MSG (which is actually gaining a resurgence among chefs) or chipped beef or gelatin, perhaps all three! I'm not sure where I'll find chipped beef or MSG in Spokane. No matter, I'm excited to experiment and see what can be attractive and delicious at the 21st century table, and what else I can learn. Most of these recipes don't have photos or detailed directions, so I view this as low pressure, starting with an attitude of "this might not taste good, but let's just see." I'll just make sure there's back-up frozen pizzas or canned soup at the ready for when a main dish is inedible.

Like these "cheese carrots" I made a few years ago.

Let the fun begin.