Cooking as a meditative / concussive act
Sometimes cooking calms me down. Sometimes it gives me a concussion.
Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and former/future tech worker who recently moved back to rural Iowa. I write about my wild and weird small town life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
It feels like 95 degrees and my brain is melting.
Or maybe my brain is melting from a mild concussion.
I hit my head last week in a ridiculous kitchen accident. The walk-in clinic told me I was fine — but that I should take a break from screens and not think too much.
I can’t take a break from screens because I’m addicted. I can’t take a break from thinking because I was born to overthink. I can’t take a break from the heat until October. So, my brain continues to melt.
//
My kitchen accident happened on a night when, in a city, I would have ordered takeout. I’d had a busy day, and I felt a little exhausted. Not exhausted enough to stop working, but exhausted enough to feel like taking care of myself was just a bridge too far.
As a single person, my meals before the pandemic and my move to Iowa were an unpredictable combination of 1) nights out at decadent restaurants or local bars, 2) takeout/delivery, and 3) feral ‘meals’ of frozen enchiladas, or peanut butter eaten by the spoonful.
Despite my semi-feral adulthood, I actually love to cook. In the beforetimes, I hosted elaborate dinner parties in San Francisco. I threw biannual Olympics parties, making my famous Olympic Rings Cakes + foods for the country hosting the Olympics (my borscht brings all the boys to the yard). But those were always big, fun gatherings that I inevitably overcooked for. I loved the pleasure of my friends’ company and the joy of giving food and community to others.
I come from a long line of people who need to feed the community around them. My grandma routinely fed dozens or hundreds of people at various events. My dad insists that we keep the wire contraption that my family rigged up to grill and flip a hundred hot dogs at once, just in case we ever need it again. We still have a hand-cranked ice cream freezer from 1907 that can make five gallons of ice cream (as my uncle once said, it only takes 220 pounds of ice!).
Still, cooking in the context of my family often felt like a service to others, or a necessary slog for subsistence.
My life in Iowa has forced me to cook, since no delivery options exist. It’s also helped me to discover the pleasure of cooking for myself. I’ve fallen in love again with the hours-long process of making boeuf bourguignon or Burmese chicken curry when I’m craving it — letting myself enjoy the time spent cooking, and not hitching my happiness to whether the end result meets someone else’s needs.
As a side benefit, cooking has, as much as anything else, finally healed some of my corporate burnout. It feels like meditation — letting my thoughts wander, and then bringing them back to rhythmic stirring and chopping. While cooking, my inner task-master Puritan is pleased that I’m doing something ‘useful,’ and so I can trick her into ignoring the fact that I’m also getting joy out of it.
It’s interesting to me (and by ‘interesting’ I mean ‘psychologically relevant to all my struggles around work and joy’) that cooking was something I gave up so easily in the name of being more efficient in my city life. Cooking focuses me on the here and now. It’s one of the things that reliably lifts my mood even on the bad days. But making something for myself was always the first thing to go when I was busy.
I was so often reduced to a feral animal with a spoonful of peanut butter, rushing to the next commitment.
My previous employer started the trend of tech companies having gourmet cafeterias, and they gave me most of my meals for free. I’ve begun to wonder if this was really a blessing. Yes, I loved some of the food and felt grateful for it at the time. And yes, my twentysomething self needed that food to make the starting salary work with San Francisco’s rents.
But I usually ate those meals out of a box balanced on my laptop as I went to my next meeting. It wasn’t so different from my feral meals at home. They gave me calories, but they usually didn’t give me joy.
They were never designed to give me space to think about why the joy was missing and what I might have enjoyed instead.
How many of us in that world ate the free food to save ourselves time and money — and in doing so, lost the memory of how food that we prepare for ourselves can connect us to our bodies and our communities?
How many of us ignored the warnings embedded in every fairy tale — that free food is never really free?
//
Jumping back to my accident (I don’t have to make smooth transitions this week because I probably have a concussion!)…
The accident was one of those freak, scary moments that never should have happened and could have been so much worse. I was making my favorite spaghetti all’amatriciana — simple pasta with red onions, bacon, garlic, olive oil, and red pepper flakes. I started by putting a pot of water on the stove to boil. I sliced a red onion into thin half-moons.
I’ve sliced an onion a thousand times before.
But on my last cut, the knife slipped and cut my finger instead.
While I’m usually your girl in a crisis, I am not your girl in a crisis involving blood. I immediately put pressure on the wound and ran it under cold water. But then I started to feel dizzy….
I knew I was going to faint. I managed to sit down on the floor as I was passing out. When I came back to life, there was water boiling on the stove and water running in the sink. I found blood smeared on my dress and drops of blood on the floor.
And the back of my head had smashed into a cabinet door, cracking the door in two as I hit it.
Since the blood was all from my finger wound and not from my head, and since it was mostly on my dress and no longer dripping, I reverted to being good in a crisis. I stood up very carefully, shut off the stove and the faucet, wiped the blood off the floor, and even put the onion into the fridge (waste not want not — although I threw away the piece that might have had my blood on it). And then I went to my room, bandaged my finger, and laid down, hungry and feral and lightheaded.
A little later, I ate my last emergency frozen enchilada. My brother arrived, so I wasn’t alone in the house with a possible concussion.
And it could have been so much worse. I could have hit my head on the counter, or a drawer handle. I could have been out long enough for the pot to boil dry. I could have died on the floor in my kitchen, smelling of blood and onions (and other things, if it took too long to find me).
But, I’m fine — my headache is mostly gone, unless I stare at screens too long or try to think too hard. Ironically, cooking has been the easiest way to feel better. I ended up making my spaghetti all’amatriciana the day after my accident, using the non-bloodied parts of the onion, and it felt like a little victory over my headache.
My brain is still melting. But for this week, at least, I’ll try more cooking and less thinking.
//
Finally, a recommendation — I’m absolutely loving Shangrilogs, a Substack newsletter by Kelton Wright.
She moved from LA to rural Colorado, and her experience resonates with mine (although she’s adding some bonus difficulty points to her #smalltownlife by doing it at altitude and with worse internet). If you like my newsletter, you should check hers out!
And if you’re reading something you think I’d like, please leave a comment - I’d love to hear about it!
Cheers,
Sara
Yikes! I am glad you are doing better. I have discovered baking this year. And friend and I get together every other month or so and spend the day baking. We have almost mastered bread and have so much fun with cookies.
Appreciate this very much!