Learning to Cook

I’m teaching myself how to cook. Though it’s been my on my to-do list for ages, I only just got around to it this fall. My husband’s a great, easy, unruffled cook—the kind who rarely uses a measuring cup, who can toss in spices with reckless, show-offy abandon, and read a magazine while multiple pots are simmering on the stove—so I’ve never had much incentive to learn. Lately, though, my cluelessness in the kitchen has stopped feeling like a blind spot and has started feeling like a character flaw. I have two daughters, and though I harbor no desire to be the next Nigella, I figure any decent mother should have more in her culinary arsenal than soft-boiled eggs from scratch.

But what finally inspired me to stop wishing I could cook and start cooking was that writing retreat Elizabeth and I took this fall at Upaya Zen Center. As students, we ate three meals a day with the Zen monks and residents; Upaya’s a meat-free campus, so the food, made from scratch in the sprawling farmhouse kitchen, consisted of whole grains and greens—quinoa, kale, oatmeal, nuts, brown rice, spinach, tofu, all served-family style at a long wooden table. Zen practitioners are big on conscious eating, and after a group prayer in which we thanked the “numberless beings who gave their strength so that we might eat and strengthen others,” we spent the first ten minutes of every meal eating in silence.

The combination of simple, vegetarian food, prepared honestly and with compassion, and eaten deliberately rather than scarfed down distractedly as per usual, made a huge impression on me. I had never felt so clean and virtuous—and hungry. Ravenous. ALL the time. I was nursing and Elizabeth was pregnant, and we’d sneak out after meals on illicit, if ill-fated, frozen-yogurt missions (strangely, Yoberri was always closed when we got there). Still, I felt that eating, which had always seemed so reactive and necessary, something to be rushed through to get to the next thing, now had larger purpose: It could help me become more present and conscious. It could be part of my fledgling Zen practice.

I liked the idea of that a lot, but the reality is that it’s pretty hard to eat with total consciousness when you’re not actually making the food yourself. When you couldn’t make the food yourself even if you wanted to. So I decided that if I wanted to eat cleaner, simpler, healthier, and more humane meals on a regular basis, to eat this food with deliberation and gratitude, and better yet, feed it to my family, I was going to have to learn to cook. Finally.

I didn’t have a plan. The idea had evolved naturally, from within—not from external pressures, though God knows, I’d felt withering disapproval from most sides on many occasions. ("What did you eat before you met Steve?” my mother-in-law once asked me pointedly.) I didn’t know how I was going to do learn to cook, only that for the first time I actually wanted to. It was no longer a should. That was what mattered.

Meditation is a solitary act. People can tell you how to fold your hands and where to fix your gaze and how to cross your legs and plump your bean-bag cushion before sitting down, but when the gong goes off, it’s just you and your racing mind. Zen meditation is the original DIY, so it seemed appropriate that learning to cook ought to be, too. I would teach myself. One recipe a week. It didn’t matter what it was—Devil’s food cake, one-egg omelet, or salmon and asparagus—just that I was inspired to try it. If I had to force myself, it wouldn’t happen. I had to feel it.

One recipe a week, anything goes. How hard could it be?