why it is sometimes nice to be a housewife
from adam gopnik's cooked books article in the new yorker:
'Rising to a higher level of culinary ambition, I went on to make, the following night, a fish-stew recipe, a kind of English bouillabaisse, from Ian McEwan’s superb “Saturday”: Henry Perowne, the central character, a neurosurgeon, cooks this elaborate dish as he watches television and broods on “monstrous and spectacular scenes.” ... [Yet] while you are doing all this, I was reminded as I did it, you are thinking about the bouillabaisse, not about life in our time. Or, rather, you are not thinking about the bouillabaisse, or about anything: you are making the bouillabaisse. And here, I suspect, lies the difficulty with using cooking as the stock for the stream-of-consciousness stew. It is that the act of cooking is an escape from consciousness - the nearest thing that the non-spiritual modern man and woman have to Zen meditation; its effect is to reduce us to a state of absolute awareness, where we are here now of necessity. You can’t cook with the news on and still listen to it, any more than you can write with the news on and still listen to it. You can cook with music, or talk radio, on, and drift in and out. What you can’t do is think and cook, because cooking takes the place of thought.'
sometimes soft rainy days such as this one are perfect in their drizzle. i walked to the mailbox to send off a letter and had one of those delicious rainy moments of clarity, like suddenly i knew what i wanted - surprising, at this juncture. or at least, the clarity started bubbling and now i'm steamed. after work and a run-ish, i curled up with a cup of tea and harry potter six, and i'm doing okay for now.
'Rising to a higher level of culinary ambition, I went on to make, the following night, a fish-stew recipe, a kind of English bouillabaisse, from Ian McEwan’s superb “Saturday”: Henry Perowne, the central character, a neurosurgeon, cooks this elaborate dish as he watches television and broods on “monstrous and spectacular scenes.” ... [Yet] while you are doing all this, I was reminded as I did it, you are thinking about the bouillabaisse, not about life in our time. Or, rather, you are not thinking about the bouillabaisse, or about anything: you are making the bouillabaisse. And here, I suspect, lies the difficulty with using cooking as the stock for the stream-of-consciousness stew. It is that the act of cooking is an escape from consciousness - the nearest thing that the non-spiritual modern man and woman have to Zen meditation; its effect is to reduce us to a state of absolute awareness, where we are here now of necessity. You can’t cook with the news on and still listen to it, any more than you can write with the news on and still listen to it. You can cook with music, or talk radio, on, and drift in and out. What you can’t do is think and cook, because cooking takes the place of thought.'
sometimes soft rainy days such as this one are perfect in their drizzle. i walked to the mailbox to send off a letter and had one of those delicious rainy moments of clarity, like suddenly i knew what i wanted - surprising, at this juncture. or at least, the clarity started bubbling and now i'm steamed. after work and a run-ish, i curled up with a cup of tea and harry potter six, and i'm doing okay for now.