toenails, pegs, jasmine rice

cooking is an interesting activity, and that adjective is far too colorless to describe the multiple meanings of cooking. by using the term activity, I place cooking among so many other activities, like aimless wandering, reading, driving to work, or cutting my toenails. each of these could well deserve its own exploration, each is packed full of culture and history and even scripts (don't cut your toenails at work, don't leave the parings on a counter or floor). but cooking is somehow broader in import and content. it is that I take an assemblage of elements, and by cutting, mashing, sauteeing, and combining them, I create something else. there is the child joy of red&green&yellow, primary elements against a blue plate. there is the moment of planned discovery, and discoveries that are more unexpected (and not always pleasant). like writing, there is a gap between what is meant, and what results; in the gap lives care and skill and compromise, slapdash hurry and slow care, tastes and onion stinging eyes. dinner is a set piece carved out of a larger marble, a table held together with handmade pegs and one leg that may be crooked. my rice tonight was mushy - I keep forgetting that jasmine rice cooks much faster than other rice I use, so the butter 'chicken' I made, together with homemade naan, sat on mushy rice - there, the crooked leg - and it was meant, as I (usually) mean my cooking to be, to be a pleasure that demanded attention, time aside, focus on each and every and altogether.