Things that make me happy: Cooking

J. says my voice and eyes lit up whenever it involves food. I dunno about that, but yeah I do get excited. That's probably one reason why they call me dwegi, ggool dwegi, ggool gggol. Someone said he wish food was in a pill. You just take it to survive. Is he nuts? To each his own. I'm definitely the type that survives to eat ..not eat to survive.

I'm not a great cook, but I just try. I don't have a specialty because I like to cook everything. If I don't know how to make a certain dish, then I'll just learn. That's probably why I'm such a recipe hog. Oh! My friend's mother makes her own dwenjang and gochujang, yet they don't have interest learning it. Gzzz....*raising my hand* I love homemade products. Man! I would love to borrow his mother for a day!

My mom doesn't cook and since I'm the oldest, I just ended up doing it. I remember setting up weekly menus and really wanting it to be a balanced meal. My siblings would share their opinions. Then I would either keep, throw, or improvise the recipe. Hmm..When I look back at that, I just want to cringe...but hey...I was just a kid learning on my own through experimenting and lots of mistakes. I'm just sorry that my siblings had to be the taste testers. haha.... It's a good thing mister eats everything I cook too. yay~



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I used to love to watch my grandmother make bread for the Sabbath. Elbow-deep in flour, she taught me kitchen psychology while braiding the dough. One morning, when I was five, she said, without lifting her eyes from the table, "People have energy which make their lives yeast. Their souls get sick if they don't let it out. It gets confused. It doesn't have a way of rising so it twists and strangles instead of becoming a new pattern." Her fingers tangled in the dough as she spoke and her beautiful bread became a mass of chaos. She struggled to free her hands. In the process, the shape of the bread was destroyed. "Then we have to go back to the beginning and start again with the kneading and the rising," she said as she began to punch the dough flat again.
-Dawna Markova in No Enemies Within

I was just thinking one morning during meditation how much alike hope and baking powder are: quietly getting what is best in me to rise, awakening the hint of eternity within. I always think of that when I eat biscuits now and wish that I could be more faithful to the hint of eternity, the baking powder in me.
-Macrina Wiederkehr in Seasons of Your Heart

The kitchen is a place that sharpens us. It's a place that wakes us up. Our sense of smell become keener. We taste with greater subtlety. We see with more clarity and our movements become quick and sure.
But there are times when we are not as sensitive, not as focused. We are distracted and nothing seems to go right. In the kitchen the results are easy to notice. The sauce burns, the bread doesn't rice, and dishes slip out of our hands.
Cooking requires that we are present. This is one of its greatest teachings.
It keeps bringing us back to what is happening in the moment and continually calls our attention to what we are doing.
We smell when the cake is ready to come out of the oven and we taste when the soup is almost done to perfection. When the water boils on the stove, we turn down the heat.
Through cooking we can become more responsive to what is happening around us. In the very same way that the Chinese cook was able to sharpen his knives just by using them, we can sharpen our lives by living them with awareness, moment by moment.
-Bettina Vitell in A Taste of Heaven and Earth