Home-Made Reality

A woman alone in her kitchen cooking for no one except herself. This is not what people think about when they think about cooking. The celebrated ideal is cooking fabulous food and inviting over all your friends to enjoy the food together. How many times have I felt horrible about not being able to please other people with my recipes? 100? 1000? In my own world, where it's just me and my body and my kitchen, it has been a monumental accomplishment to learn to cook for myself. Monumental, glacial migrating, intergalactic, stupendous, epic, life altering achievement.

A lot of factors have contributed to my not cooking for other people. 1. Most people, even if they prefer healthy or home-made food to processed or uber-seasoned, still want a certain level of sophistication or complexity in a dish prepared by someone else. 2. I'm not a genius at cooking. 3. My super sensitive body has never tolerated soy sauce, wine, cheese, MSG, teriyaki, horseradish, sugar, or dried fruit, and at various periods I have also had to forgo tomatoes, potatoes, dried herbs, garlic of any kind, fruit, vinegre, yeast, and salt.

I have struggled in my life to find and honor my own voice, and keep it from getting drowned out by other peoples' voices and the voice of the world. In my kitchen, the sky is blue, and I value simplicity, freshness, and abstaining from anything and everything necessary to heal my body. I don't need to be the girl that throws dinner parties, and I don't need to be the girl whose nail soup makes people swoon, and my boyfriend doesn't need a mom-girlfriend, he needs a healthy happy partner.

My voice in the kitchen has been feeding my body and my soul for quite awhile now. I would like to thank myself for all the hard work and improvement in cooking. I choose to no longer be swayed by whatever weirdness other people have with food. I know what works for me and I know how to please myself. I'm not alone. I have centuries of other cooks behind me, and it's my own decision to count myself among them, and not excluded just because my voice is different.

Home-made fish sticks are what turned this tide. Last night I bit into a bite size piece of tilapia battered with a mixture of ground pine nuts, arrowroot starch, flax meal, and dry mustard powder, and fried in walnut oil. I didn't even mean to make a fish stick, it was an accident. I didn't even know I missed fish sticks. But a fish stick is what is was, and it was way better than the ones from the box. I whine sometimes about not getting to eat processed food, complex, and uber-seasoned food, but slowly and surely I really am learning to prefer better food.