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For Those Busy Weeknights
Dearest You,
Let’s face it. Life moves fast. And if you’re a busy mama like me, your week is non-stop. Is is lacrosse day or ballet day? (Um, excuse me! When will it be spa day?!) All the more reason to cherish those easy breezy recipes that can be whipped up at a moment’s notice. That said, I’d love to share a quick one that is near and dear to my heart.
But first a brief literary diversion.
Because, as nobody but me has ever mused, cooking is like storytelling. Standing here in my kitchen, lingering a while on this morsel of thought, I pinch a grain of pink Himalayan salt between my social-savvy typing fingers and I press it to my tongue. The shock of flavor ignites the senses and sends me hurtling into the past. I am transported…
Back to my early twenties. The year is 2008 and I am studying abroad in Catalonia. Mediterranean salt air permeates my days and my life is quite bloggable.
I set out for the countryside to see what my taste buds may find.
I don’t know it yet, but this sojourn will plant the seeds of my lifelong love affair with food. Also my lifelong love affair with a mercurial Catalan moped mechanic named Josep. But that’s a story for another time.
By the side of the road I approach a churro merchant with an effervescent smile and a hideous skin tag on his eyelid. I fling him a Euro and he produces the cinnamon delight, its tip dipped in sweet dulce de leche.
I take a bite and am transported…
Back to my crib. The year is 1988. I am a baby. I teethe. My gums erupt in a blaze of pain and on top of all that, I am starving. I crave Gerber pouch. The sweet soothing smear of apple paste is all that will offer me succor now. A balm for both the body and the soul. Mother heeds my shrieking and arrives bearing the pouch.
No sooner does the paste touch my tongue than I am transported…
Back to the Ottoman Empire. The year is 1302. I am Osman II and I laze in the courtyard picking at a bowl of fresh dates. I am the sultan and I wield much power. Apparently I’ve always been an influencer. Several days from now, I will be captured and strangled to death by janissaries in the depths of Yekidule Fortress.
But today, I laze. Basking in the Anatolian sun, I bite a date and am intoxicated by its singular zing. I am utterly transported.
Back to the birth of the universe. I am dust. I am gas. I am… and I am not. The year is irrelevant. The whole of cosmic history lies nascent in my expansive consciousness like a vast montage of life, death, creation, and destruction but not in a pretentious heavy-handed way like that Aronofsky movie Postcards From Earth. God, I hated that movie.
Anyway, time does not exist as a linear progression of moments, but rather as a vast expanse backward, forward, hither, thither, etcetera, and ad finitum. All at once, I see every one of my states of being including the moment some 13 billion years from now when, poised in my kitchen with a pinot noir at the ready, I press a grain of pink Himalayan salt to my tongue. And I begin to cook.
Recipe
Ingredients
1 Hot Dog
1 Bun
1 Bottle of Plochman’s Extra Strength Mustard
Directions
Step 1
Fill a saucepan with about 4 cups of water. Boil. Insert hot dog. Boil until hot dog is…hot.
Step 2
Dress the dog liberally with mustard.
Step 3
Be transported.
Epilogue
It’s an old culinary adage that you cannot spell “cooking” without “cook.” And as we all know, Webster’s dictionary defines the verb “cook” as “to engage in the act of cooking.”
So we come full circle. Back to the beginning. And so I leave you with this quote from Proust, unabashed lazy eater and lover of mass-produced cured meat products:
An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me. It was in a bottle. A bottle of Plochman’s Classic Extra Strength Yellow Mustard.