UK
Ohh sonny, you know. When I think back about cooking I remember the wild times in my teens when I started wielding a knife for the first time. Actually, when I realised that cooking is really about the fun of cutting and preparing, sizzling…BORING.
Oh man, I can’t write like this…I need…I need… a shake! A huge milkshake in a big steel bucket. That’s life. That’s what I call quality of life. On a Saturday afternoon after a long week. Imagine me sitting in a rocking chair looking at you with my milkshake, telling you the old stories of papa Dan’s first experiences of cooking.
Beginning to learn to cook
Back in the days of my olden home in Switzerland, where the legends tell of high mountains, everybody skiing all the time and living peacefully with cows drinking coffee out of golden mugs. No actually, none of that is true except one of those (I’ll leave you to find out which one).
But back to the topic at hand. At home, I started to learn how to cook after realising that I had to cook for my health. I was overweight and had no idea what nutrition actually entailed. That changed drastically as I got more involved with food and its preparation. That was the dawn of my development in the culinary arts. I enjoyed it for years, creating new recipes, and all sorts of weird experiments.
One of my Burger was called the “Heaven & Hell” because one part was spicy and the other tenderly sweet. That kinda art, ya dig?
It was quite an outrageous adventure where I learned the basics and some tricks of the trade. Completely naive as I was, I had big ambitions, learning from masters in London, which I eventually did. However, reality taught me that most people are not chefs, nor do I have the drive to become one and neither am I one of them.
That time was when I realised that my inclination with cooking was more superficial than a deep calling and my weird recipes that I held so high were, by the end of the day, just experiments. After that, food was less something of super high importance and more a place of just having fun with ingredients and occasionally trying out new recipes, which strengthened me in my “specialisation” in making burgers.
This tells me a lot about the connection I have with food. For me it’s not about creating flashy crazy recipes (anymore) but more about preparing food that will satiate and improve health every day. Part necessity and part passion. Realistic. Simple. Economic.
The play, the sensation, all the little things that go back to who you really are as a person. Not the prestige or the potential competition but the simple and satisfying knowledge that you like the taste of what you cooked and that the people you cook for like to eat it too.
That’s it for the moment. Peace.
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