Christin Taylor: Words on the Side

The joy of cooking has come slowly to me. It’s really no wonder. As I look back over my life, there are many ways in which I have been a late bloomer, and finding my way around the kitchen is one of them.

I never cared too much to be in the kitchen with my mom as a child. She tried, oh she tried, to get me interested, to involve me. One of her great laments in life was the fear that she had never fully taught me how to cook. She worried that she sent me off into the world unprepared.

But really, this was not her fault. It was mine. She couldn’t really keep me by her side in that kitchen, instead I was always wondering off, more interested in other things, more intangible things, like relationships, and theater, and singing, and stories.

When I got married, my cooking career started off with a fire. Two weeks into our marriage Dwayne and I invited two couples over for dinner. I decided to make lasagna, a wildly ambitious dish for a girl who didn’t know how to cook. And I set the thing on fire, while our guests were seated at the table, waiting ridiculously long hours for dinner to be served.

We turned to see smoke billowing out of the oven, and after the scurry and rustle of flapping dish towels and lots of blowing, we settled down to a crunchy meal of charred noodles and cheese.

My second late, great debut into the cooking realm came when I decided to make pimiento spread sandwiches for dinner. You question my taste and choice for such a meal? Yeah, so do I. That’s the point. I hardly knew what pimiento was, and to this day I have not lived down that dinner in my household – we’re talking 10 years later.

This morning, I stood over a bowl of diced sweet potatos covered in olive oil, paprika and salt. I shook the bowl, scooped the pieces out with my fingers, and dropped them onto a baking dish. As I moved my hand back and forth, I noted the pleasant texture of the oil smooth like silk mingled with the tiny gritty sands of salt. And I got it.

I’ve been getting it for a while now – the reason why people love cooking so much, love writing about it, watching shows about it, reading about it.

It’s a whole body experience, not just taste, but touch, and smell and sight. It’s the feel of the ingredients as you move them and chop them and clean them. It’s the colors of the food as you toss them and pull them and dice them. It’s the fragrance as they sit roasting in the oven. It’s the whole body satisfaction of eating something clean and simple and fresh.

It’s taken me a while to get here – about 32 years. But I’ve arrived. And in a way, I know I have my new found gluten allergy to thank. I have been learning how to cook these last ten years, but it wasn’t until I got sick that I started having to really learn about food, all kinds of food, the properties of it, how it works together, how it plays upon the members of our body and health.

And in this education I’ve stumbled on creativity, a new found sense of empowerment. Recipes no longer intimidate me, no long march down the columns of a page like hard and fast rules, formulas that result in disaster if not followed to a precise measurement.

It’s amazing how good food can taste, when your body isn’t treating it like a disease.

Here’s what I’m making for lunch today: Lentil Salad with Smoked Almonds.