In the beginning of the semester, I wrote my first post for the Currently Eating section of the Boylan Blog. After reviewing this post with my fellow Blog writers and interns at our weekly meeting, I made a proclamation that it would be both my first and last time writing for this section. Alas, here I am writing about eating my words.
Now my apprehension about writing on food does not arise out of a bad relationship with it. I love eating, and I have extremely fond memories about meals being prepared and shared with my small but tight-knit family. Even today, I can remember my father propping up the dining room chair along side him at the stove. My little body would hover over the stove like a giant, and I would marvel at the unique concoction my father was mixing together in order to feed us for dinner. I would pass him black pepper, or salt, and sometimes if I was lucky, would be trusted enough to sprinkle some on whatever pot he was using.
I have a great relationship with food, I simply have no interest in preparing it as an adult. As much as I know my parents would love to have had those childhood experiences inform my later life decisions, the cooking scenarios were not one of them. I guess its the process that annoys me. I first have to be hungry enough to want to get out of bed to prepare the food, and by the time I get to prepare the food, I’m already picking away at several of the ingredients.
And so, writing about food becomes a difficult task to manage for me. I mean, I guess I could write about the literal things I am currently eating, but no one wants a boring blog post that contains a basic recipe that you’ll 1. Most likely never prepare and 2. Get annoyingly hungry from reading about food. Writing about the process of making food always feels like the better route to take because it involves a degree of creativity and humanity, to a blog post that can easily be written in a basic, boring way. However, I don’t cook…
Well, there is one thing in my life that reinforces my appreciation for food, and that’s watching Gordon Ramsay’s shows. His shows have the perfect blend of trashy reality television personalities, and people that hold real talent, all in one entertaining program. My current favorite is Hell’s Kitchen where about twenty aspiring chefs are divided into two teams and compete to win the ultimate prize of becoming a head chef at one of Ramsay’s restaurants, and a substantial salary.
Ramsay is notoriously brutal to those cooks who under-perform his high standard, but I actually appreciate his tantrums in an odd way. I remember watching Ramsay’s first TV Show, Boiling Point, and seeing how dedicated he was to perfecting his craft. I appreciate the level of perfection and mastery chefs attend to their craft. It’s nice… for them.
-Justine Mekonen
The Junction Journal 