I am not a patient person. I use my horn too much in the car, I speed from point A to point B, whether or not I’m actually in a hurry, and I’m just noticing this impatience (which I can say with certainty that I get from my mother!) might be a puzzle piece to the whole picture of my food incompetence.
Ben’s parents have been doing everything they can to preserve the fresh goodness of the garden; pickling green beans and zucchini, pre-making squash to freeze for a warm winter quickie meal, and they always make jars of salsa and sauce with their fresh tomatoes. All these things not only take time to prepare but are products that you put away for another day. Perhaps because of the haste with which I move through life I am missing out on something essential for creating great food, but most importantly fresh food year ’round.
Side note: Yet, now that I’m really thinking about it, it seems to me like this could be a regionally necessary practice. Here in VT we have 8 months of barren winter, where sites of fresh fruit on the trees and in gardens hiding behind white picket fences, is buried beneath mounds of white powder. Fresh food is no longer abundant, so we must refer to our big freezer in the basement and pull out the yield of seasons past.
Back on track, I feel like an important part of cooking is patience; for both the physical act of letting something eek out the entirety it’s goodness, or soak up every ounce of succulent juices, as well as the patience to save something tongue-smackingly good — let’s be honest, it’s not often that I create something of that calibur, but still! — for later. I often have a hard time leaving anything on my plate because it’s so good I want to eat it all right then. I know that this is probably the case with most people, but finding patience in the kitchen or at the dinner table could be a necessary part of my ability to become a good cook!
I’m not really sure this is going to be a completed blog post, as my thoughts are trailing off when I try to focus in on the point of this new cooking discovery. For now, I’ll leave you with this quote I found:
“Real cooking, it turns out, relies heavily on another lost art: patience.” — The Lost Art of Patient Cooking, by Rosanna Nafziger
Will Run For Food 