Timing

Truthfully all the durations in my recipes are guestimates. When I say five minutes I just mean what felt like a short amount of time. I was not looking at the clock. I imagine this isn’t a surprise to anyone. Timing in cooking is vague and conditional, something sensed out and learned.

Despite knowing this about myself, it is sometimes easy for me to get take the numbers of minutes in someone else’s recipe as absolute. There are far too many variables that make this impossible. Even if the recipes were written from precise timings in the author’s kitchen, these do not necessarily or even often translate well into another kitchen. Ingredients differ, altitudes differ, pans differ, burners differ, etc. There is a complex if not always logical process of translation. Often what the recipe says marks the dish as done is more absolute than the cooking time. But those numbers are not useless. They might tell me that something is different. If the recipe says 45 minutes and the cake has been in for an hour and still doesn’t look done, then something is different, even though what exactly is the work of sketchy reasoning.

Either improvised or from a recipe, cooking involves for me a great deal of anxiety about how long to cook something. The worst are the things I can’t taste for doneness, like baked goods or roast chicken. Or tea, which I rigidly time but am always wondering if I should leave the leaves in longer or take them out early. Even when I cook something as simple as sauteed vegetables I go to the pan every two minutes to taste how soft they are, and am constantly uncertain if they’re soft enough or too soft. It’s not really two minutes, it’s more like I’ll take it off the burner when I’m done reading a blog post, after I feed the dogs, after I go to the bathroom, after I finish doing the dishes, etc.

The clock, in other words, is a deceptive ally to cooking. It deludes cooks into false certainties that assume the kitchen is the same as the mechanical innards of a clock. Timing, on the other hand, is essential.

Failed Psychogastronomy

It's easy for me to forget that food can have dire effects on us. More than something that is tasty, or something to eat because you are hungry, it heats you up, cools you down, energizes you, makes you sleepy, gives you a headache, burns your cheeks, as well as plenty else. There are also all the long-term health effects diet may have, but I am talking about effects at an immediate level of sensation, emotion, and bodily helplessness. Taking a cue from bringing to light the abject aspect of digestion, I want to conceptually explode the body and the subject further. Rather than thinking of food as having effects upon the self or the body, but I would like to think of food's entry itself as a beginning of these identities. Let us take the adage "you are what you eat" to an extreme.

Can language do this? Can subject, object, and verb be arranged to bring about their undoing?

I bring this up because of a fairly mundane drink of yogurt, water, and honey. It was just what I needed at the time I drank it; it was soothing and cooling (both in the sense of temperature and otherwise). For a while it transformed what I could and could not sense. It would be nice to place cognition aside from this externalizing gustatory scene, but I'm afraid it too bends and is bent by eating. I began to write the recipe for this drink, which led somehow into reading lassi recipes online. My half-cognition of what happened recognized itself through a descriptor in one of these recipes: "soothing." This validated my feeling that the drink had brought about a change. Which brings me to trying to write this and having difficulty remembering anything beyond the words I read in that recipe somewhere (and I can’t find the recipe either). This doesn’t make the case for what I was saying about cognition at all. Damn.

Honey Lassi

1/2 cup yogurt
1 cup water
2 teaspoons honey

In a glass drip honey over yogurt. Use honey-covered spoon to mix together yogurt and honey as thoroughly as possible. Without removing spoon, add water. Stir until most of the honey is dissolved from the spoon.

Pantry Cleanse I: Assorted Legumes

Whoever decided to package several different varieties of beans and lentils in a “Gourmet Bean Blend” is an idiot. A very clever idiot, because people buy this stuff. It’s an appealing idea to make soup from this rainbow legume hodgepodge, however the logistics of actually cooking them all together like this are impossible, or at the very least not ideal. The trouble is that a yellow split pea and and a red bean take vastly different amounts of time to cook, and uncooked legumes do not taste good. The only solution is to cook the largest beans completely, and in so doing cook everything else to death. As we often hear, the lowest common denominator tyrannizes everyone else.

Beans take a long time to cook. This wouldn’t much of an issue, except that legumes are to soup what dirt is to mud--they settle to the bottom. So they have to be unstuck from the bottom every few minutes to keep them from burning. After five hours of walking back and forth between the pot of beans and whatever else I was doing, it was two in the morning and I was sick of it. The beans were not entirely cooked, but they were edible. Sometimes, as in writing this blog entry, one has to stop.

2 cups "Gourmet Bean Blend"
6 medium tomatoes
1 large onion
3 tablespoons cooking oil
2 cloves garlic
2 teaspoons mustard seeds
1 tablespoon coriander powder
1 1/2 tablespoons sambar powder

Soak beans in cold water for 8 hours. Finely chop onion and garlic. Drain water that beans were soaking in, and transfer beans to a large pot. Cover beans in 2 inches of water and begin bringing it to a boil. In a large, covered saucepan on medium heat fry mustard seeds in oil until most of them pop. Add onion and garlic and reduce heat to medium-low. Add coriander and sambar powder. Continue frying until onions are soft, stirring every few minutes. When beans have begun to boil, reduce heat to medium-low. Cut tomatoes into large chunks. When onions are done mix in tomatoes. When tomatoes have disintegrated and reduced to a thick sauce, transfer tomato-onion mixture to bean pot. Cook for however long it takes for all beans to become tender, possibly six hours. Stir often to keep from burning. When done, salt to taste.