Nourishing the Process
On Writing and Cooking
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An idea blooms over coffee. An idea blooms over midnights, over stoves while cooking, or else on the streets while running or walking. An idea starts as starlight, as a seed, then makes its way with steadiness or urgency through ink onto the back of a receipt. An idea blooms alone, on the road, in sprints or in slowness, in the oven, or together, in light, in tandem. Over time, and nourished enough, an idea begins growing. Then, opening.
An idea starts and I greet the early hour day cutting a gala apple into the smallest pieces. The pieces are red and bright, cool and pooling their juices, and I scoop them up by the handful, raining them down onto yogurt swirled in a bowl in the morning. It’s the meal that grounds my early hours, bringing in satiety and familiarity. Variations of granola take form — lately dried ginger, cut pieces of dried citrus. Later, dinner comes together in the full bright sun of the evening. An idea forms while pouring flour until it makes a small hill in the basin of my silver bowl, the mound of flour then made to an effervescent paste with the addition of seltzer, the paste joined with dried threads of dill cut with scissors straight into the bowl, the carbonation flowering out. An idea, gaining in light, heat, time, continues.
Later, I nourish the idea, cutting rounds of squash into slices. I am tasting and touching, testing for salt and sweet and ripeness, running the knife against the wooden board as I chop this weary, worn zucchini into coins, finding revival in a rhythm of cooking, this currency of eating, noting the seeds and their possibilities revealed in the slices. Seltzer, herbs, and flour combine and expand, as bubbles make constellations as if stars or the small radiant faces of waxflowers blooming against the bottom of the bowl. Florets of bright broccoli flower open as I push their crowns against the bowl, collecting batter, singing out in a sizzle as they make contact with oil heated in the pan. A giant mound of cheese is placed down at the center of a Friday evening. Black pepper rains down, and drops of olive oil, bringing floral bites to the dripping strings of cheese, arranged and noted in awe, as if peony.
Often I eat and my mind settles. Cooking is one of the ways I’ve learned to love my mind over the years — as is writing. I’d thought for some time there was something incomplete about the ways my ideas started, sparked, or else didn’t, fizzling out by way of low or no flame, or otherwise bursting forward in aliveness at other times, then flowing from one insight to the next. Instead, whether by page or by plate, I find affirmation in my own rhythms and the pacing of cooking and writing, and both food and writing, as with meditation, show a way to flow with mind, making moments that matter out of this innate curiosity, both processes ways to to spark delight, to find a place to pour wonder and insight. I take the desire for intensity and click on the stove, or open to words, or put feeling into flavor, taking the yearning for awe and surprise and finding it in an idea that forms, or the first bite of charred red pepper, or the deep rich melt of chocolate, or cheddar crisped over heat joined to the flat side of a date.
With cooking, as with tending an idea in life or on page, there is a kind of immediacy that joins with the patience of pacing: we need to eat, and so we must either find food, or find some way to make it, or make it miraculously appear. Appetite is the hungered lion within us, whether for idea or the reality of food, and often, in cooking and writing we must surrender ourselves to the moment, or rather give over to the amount of time it takes to cook the food. Hunger, as with an idea or an insight for writing, comes on slowly, at times, or else arrives seemingly out of nowhere, as if stomach were a summer storm gusting through, and you’re in the middle of the street stuck in the immediate regret or occasional delight of a July downpour.
Like cooking, with writing, I learn to meet myself with the ingredients of time: in patience, in duration, and pacing. I sense it’s a deepening of presence with sensory experience that strengthens my focus and love of the process. Immersive: cooking and writing condense life down, into insight or flavor, and ask, often, for balance. Whether word or pan, we learn to sense and taste and feel the moment. Is the writing is too slow? Turn up the heat. Too fast? Take a deep breath. Under seasoned? Find some source of salinity: salt the water, take a run, or else read, or stretch, or laugh.
Cooking and writing are processes of collaboration. You collaborate with yourself in appetite and ideas, meeting palate and page with ingredients from the earth, combining ideas, intentions, and technique, relating all to forces which are perpetual and larger than you: time, oxygen, and the inevitable decay therein. Vegetables, fruit, bread, and ideas all find their fullest forms and then decay in collaboration with their environments. Time and oxygen move us into continuity, and I cannot force an egg to cook faster, much less convince an idea to flower or an essay to take form, as much as I can coax broccoli or peach to stay in their idealized, bright, nutrient dense forms. Time is the ingredient, as is patience, and trusting yourself enough to unfold the process. Then the process becomes one of presence, sensing, and paying attention.
Presence in writing is felt, and presence in cooking is felt, and both good writing and good cooking elicit a similar sense of awe: a delicious taste, a mouth full of yes, a resonant feeling. Cooking and writing come and say, now, this. Stay here in the now; feel present in the process. Watch the stove, and the sentence, and the flame; feel around for doneness or coolness, for where you need a hint of brightness; and watch as ideas or insights, sparking off as if flower or firework, start, feeling the delight of new synapses forming. Flourishing, words and sentences become balanced and vibrant, covered in chocolate curl, bite of brine, refined with time, or softened with olive oil. Feeling synapses form, whether from plate of food or essay, feels as nourishing, to me, as a slow Saturday lunch; deeply grounding, bringing with it aliveness.
An idea starts as a need, then flowers out: I take stock of that which I have, that which I have energy for, what I’m feeling, what I need, and how fast I need to write or eat, and that guides my decision making. Cooking and writing both care for body and mind, and I watch, as ideas form, and feel as they feel stretch when mind needs air, water, nourishment. An appetite has a language and a voice, and sometimes it whispers, and sometimes it howls; most ripples in the fabric of focus, I think, can be fixed with a glass of water, a deep stretch, a slow breath, or the bright red bite of an apple.
Cooking and writing often start with wondering as petals of an idea unfold. A rose, an idea, the layers of pastry, an artichoke, curiosity balms and opens, revealing dimensions in layers and layers. An idea blooms, an insight forms, and the feeling of understanding through writing and cooking become more distinct with time and practice. A question meets an idea meets an answer in a pan, on a page, or on a plate — What happens if I char this? Whisk here? Bake longer? Pull this word? Change this sentence? Combine these flavors? Could this mix with this? And so on — and this curiosity drives the work of writing, transforming toward an appetite of continuity.
I write this piece across the time and tastes of several meals: granola dotted with fruit in the morning; salmon cooked in butter, garlic, and the thickening gold of yesterday’s broth; then, later, dragonfruit’s electric pink whirred with yogurt and berries for sugar and color in the slow, dragging part of the day. Each bite, color, day shakes a new facet of idea loose, until the idea grows. When we can relax and unfurl, our appetites for living not only flower but flourish; a squash blossom, given the right environment, produces bright orange flowers, then the vegetable we cut and cook and serve warm on tables; given the right environment or channel by which we flow into, our minds can grow, ground, and begin to fruit.
Writing doesn’t ask to astound every day, and neither does eating. You simply need devotion to what’s in front of you, a few minutes, some seed of wonder, whether it’s a yearning for ingredient, taste, or idea. Taking stock, you learn to flow with the moment. What do you have? What do you care to do with it? How much time do you want to give? What do you want to taste from piece, plate, idea, or experience? How do you want to feel? Then turn on the stove, join with your pen, and begin.
Nourished by, Nourishing:
A reread of An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler.
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