Day 650 April 13, 2022

Sukiyaki

I always enjoyed the idea of cooking. In high school, I took all the levels of chef’s class. I met my freshman year girlfriend in chef’s class. Maria was proud of making spaghetti sauce from scratch, which I didn’t really fathom, but she was Italian, and I imagine had a much more authentic and pure vision of what spaghetti sauce should taste like. I didn’t make red sauce from scratch, but I emulated my father and cut up lots of vegetables, whatever was in the refrigerator, stir fried them, then mixed them into a jar of whatever red sauce was handy, and seasoned with pepper and slices of cheese.

When chef’s class made pancakes, I went rogue and made the crepes my father made and what I grew up eating, but I have since learned they are not really crepes at all, but some interpretation of crepes that some people find disappointing, much like I imagine Maria would have felt about my spaghetti sauce. But I didn’t know better then, and made a big show of not following directions, and then flipping my delicate confections into the air higher and higher until everyone was flipping pancakes, but mostly the heavy spongy kind. Mine were wrapped around a hot apple compote and drizzled with syrup. Even now it makes my nose shiver with pleasure. 

My mother is the one who taught me to slice the scallions lengthwise first, one cut on each leaf, once down the stalk, and then diagonal to get the most flavor out. My parents would get excited when there was some big production involved with dinner, like making Korean sukiyaki on an electric pan in the middle of the kitchen table, all the ingredients sliced and laid out ready to be added. Both of them taking turns deciding what should be added next, whether to turn up or down the heat, what was ready to be portioned out to each of our plates with their deft chopsticks.

I haven’t tried making sukiyaki, and haven’t had it since our last trip to Korea a few years ago. That is something to look forward to.

These days I am cooking recipes that arrive in a box on Monday afternoons. They are prepackaged portions with recipes that I squint over as I zest lemons or spoon turmeric onto rice, neither a thing I ever engaged in before the pandemic. A by product of my lack of imagination, has been the adoption of these meals in a box. I am making new foods that taste good, are made with relatively fresh produce, and it is easy and involves very little creativity. But because of that lack of creativity, there is a certain blandness, a lack of verve, a little sadness to each of these meals, like the are mere simulacrum of the photos on the front of each recipe sheet. 

I look forward to a future when I have more time, when I am not starting to cook dinner at 7:30, when I can call my mother and ask for her recipe for this thing or that, her approximate units of measurement a testimony to her ingenious sense of taste and smell, her special kind of creativity. I don’t know if all children feel this way, but nearly every meal is a disappointment when compared to the same thing my mother made. I have been ruined by pleasure.

I’ll have to research sukiyaki, and maybe I will gather those ingredients this weekend, see if I need to order a pan, stop by the Asian grocery for those little mushrooms, call my mom for suggestions on how to make the broth.