I keep looking at the list of things I want to do and I know it's too long. I can't get all that stuff done. So I thought I'd try to cut back on my cooking. You know, cook once or twice a week - enough stuff so that the rest of the week I could just grab something and heat/eat it?
It's not happening. For example today I made yama imo salad. Only now that I googled yama imos (a kind of Japanese yam) I find that I made satsuma imo salad. Not traditional but still very tasty. The salad involves cutting a raw yam into julienne strips, soaking the strips in a vinegar and sake marinade then draining them and serving them in a different vinegar, sake and sugar marinade and garnishing with slivers of lime zest. Did I get out my mandoline to cut the potato up? Hell no! I did it by hand. It took a while. I enjoyed it too!
I found the yams at Whole Foods. The sign said "Japanese Yams." There are a lot of different Japanese yams. The sign could have been more informative.
I'm starting to go off on a tangent about Japanese yams. I should stop.
The point is I like fresh food and I like cooking. Plus cooking gives you a quick payoff. You get the satisfaction of using your hands and your head to make something good and then you get to eat it. Often the rewards arrive in under an hour. Much more immediate than when making art. Also more ephemeral.
So I'm finding it hard to save myself time by cooking less. Maybe I don't value time as much as I value doing whatever I damn well please? I'm having a bit of trouble pinpointing exactly what it is that I value over time.
Maybe it's not so much that I don't value time but that I'm using it to do things that might be less important to me in the long run than other things I could be doing.
Who can say? Some people believe that we should "live in the now." The me in the "now" then wanted to find out about this potato and the salad it would make. Burning with curiosity about a yam. That's so weird that it's got to be worth something.
1 comment:
I love you, Mel!
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