I’ve been thinking about the phrase, “Cooking Dinner.”
I use it too freely and maybe incorrectly, giving out the wrong impression. A small percentage of what I do is actually cooking. What I do is make dinner or maybe prepare dinner. What’s cooking really mean? I’m going to have to look it up.
I was watching somebody make a dish the other day on a video. This gentlemen touted that an important part about his recipe was to prepare every single ingredient in advance, to prep or cut and get them ready in advance because the dish cooked so fast. And I know, inherently, I do that sometimes too. When I’m trying to make Asian food, I cut up and chop and get every single ingredient ready, because it all goes in so fast.
So then, I was thinking, I say “cooking dinner,” but really a lot of it’s the preparation of the ingredients. And some dishes I don’t like to make as much because there’s too much chopping. Then there is sometimes chopping foods and getting them prepared is very therapeutic, like doing the dishes. It’s mindless and almost relaxing. Is that why I like cooking, I mean, “making dinner?” Is it relaxing?
To me the word cooking actually means that you’re standing over a stove stirring. How much time when we cook dinner, do we actually spend stirring, sauting or moving a utensil around a pan? I think that we spend the majority of the time cutting up and preparing the ingredients. And then we stick it in the oven. We stick it in a crock pot, we put it on the stove to simmer.
So, from now on, I’m to be really being conscious to say that I’m going to “prepare” or “make” dinner. I don’t want the readers here to think I am always slaving to get a meal on the table. I’m just going to get a meal ready. Sometimes I talk about “cooking” meals for your family, but I may be just opening a can.
I do a lot of homemade things, but not everything. I like to cook the food but it’s about the entire package. If I have a lot of a different dishes in a meal, I’ll do one homemade that I have to prep and cook and the rest will be a box or a can. It’s pretty challenging to do too many of those things at the same time. How many arms do we have after all?
Instead of saying “Cooking Dinner” maybe I should describe preparing my meals as “taking an idea, coming up with a plan. Organizing and chopping it, blending with love, and creating a delicious dinner out of products I had to hunt at stores and in my pantry.”
More accurate?