alone in the kitchen with an eggplant

i have always loved cooking since the age of say, 1o? and yes, i DO mean i love cooking, as much as i love to eat. more often than not, and sad to say, however, i haven't been immersing myself in the process of preparing food all these years. as much as i'd like to, i just don't usually have that luxury of time; it's a race against time (trust me, i mean it) whenever i prepare dinner for my family (i don't have a very patient mother). well, yes, cooking for your loved ones is a huge blessing in itself because it probably means u actually have loved ones to cook for.

i digress.

so, today, i actually took some time to marinate some 24 chicken wings for tomorrow and boy, that was some therapeutic experience (okay i've tried my best to bring across that point without remotely sounding like i'm making some sort of revelation). well, so i took my time at it - washing the wings, cleaning them with salt and flour to get rid of any hint of the "frozen" smell (okay i just revealed that i use frozen chicken wings). then i gotta rinse the salt and flour away and chop 'em up one by one into 2, and squeezing any excess water away before putting them together into my mixing bowl. so that's the PRE-marination steps that took the bulk of the time. all this while, i was just focusing on every step and movement and my head was just BLANK. or maybe, i was thinking about those wings (and their owners perhaps). in any case, i came out of the entire process feeling pretty refreshed.

moral of the story? marinate your chicken wings the night before so you can take as much time as you want to think of how the wings might look if they had the feathers on and the number of chickens slaughtered for your family's dinner (okay if you thought about those you'd probably not eat them the next day).

so, to wrap it up, here are two excerpts from one of my favourite books - alone in the kitchen with an eggplant:

Call it seven-thirty on a Wednesday night. No one else is at home. A slight hunger hums in your body, so you wander into the kitchen. In front of the window a plant's stem wave like arms from their hanging basket. In the pantry bin, potatoes eye the onions slipping out of their skins. An apron hangs from the closet door like the shadow of a companion. Reflexively, you open the refrigerator and nod the the condiments, grab the hot sauce, and close the others bank into cold darkness. Bottle of sauce in hand, you gaze around the room, inspecting the contents of the cabinets, the pile of paper menus from nearby restaurants, the spines of your cookbooks. You turn from the bookshelf and catch a glimpse of yourself in the window. In the heat, your hair has puffed wildly. You experience one of those weird lost minutes inside your head. Loneliness, you think, loneliness with its lyrical sound; you look like a lone lioness. You hear Alvy Singer, the young Woody Allen character from Annie Hall, say, "The universe is expanding." Bananas Shaughnessy from The House of Blue Leaves cuts him off: "My troubles all began a year ago - two years ago today - Two days ago today? Today." Then you remember your mother mixing cream cheese and lox into a pan of scrambling eggs.

You don't need a literal eggplant on hand to realize - with the pleasurable shock that comes from recognizing a small truth - that you are alone in the kitchen with one.

- Jenni Ferrari-Adler

Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

- Laurie Colwin