The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [39]
“Cooking can say a lot about a person’s character,” I said to Ben later on that night.
I began wondering what my cooking might reveal about me, or vice versa. What was my cooking style? Aside from the fact that I didn’t eat in restaurants, was there any type of food that defined me?
At this point in my experiment, I had grown accustomed to cooking every day. I looked forward to it—I’d dream up recipes during the day, or browse recipes or food stories on the Internet. Then I’d buy some ingredients and spend the rest of the night enjoying the new process, the ingredients, or the flavors. If I was too busy, or simply wasn’t up to a night of serious recipe making, I’d throw together something light and easy—like pasta with a few chopped-up vegetables and grated cheese, or a stir-fry of one meat and one veggie over rice. I found the simplicity of these dishes satisfying, too, and knowing I could always whip up one or another of these gave me the strength to bluster on.
Ben offered little more than a shrug in response. He wasn’t a hobbyist cook himself, so the rare times he did make a spaghetti dinner with jarred pasta sauce, or a bowl of cereal, said very little about his character. But Ben wasn’t completely undomestic, either. He had an eye for design, while I had none. So he took it upon himself to do all the careful arranging and decorating of our apartment. Within a week of moving in, he’d painted one wall off-white with thick, beige vertical stripes. He projected an old photograph of cross-country bicyclists on another wall and painted over the projection to create a mural. The rest of the walls were filled with framed art, and he’d picked out furniture to mesh with the setting. The way I would have furnished an apartment on my own would have been to dump a chair I found on the sidewalk here, a table I found on the sidewalk there, until the place just barely resembled a room. I guess that doesn’t say very much for my taste or character except that I’m lazy and very thrifty.
During the next few months, I found myself wanting to cook with more meaning somehow. Currently, the recipes on my blog were of all different types of food, usually ones that I had never made before and was trying out for the first time, to varying levels of success. I wanted to find more of a niche, to hone in on some sort of focus in my cooking. Was it budget friendly? Time saving? Earth friendly, perhaps? Maybe I’d try to think about all those things a little more from now on, and see where that went. I also wanted to discover more about the idea of cooking, or not eating out, from other voices, like my friends, but also people whom I didn’t know. I wanted to see what they expressed through what they were cooking, meet them, get to know them through food. There had to be plenty of people out there who were cooking at home often, and might be doing so for purposes beyond just eating. These were the types of people I wanted to meet soon.
Smoky Black Bean and Spinach Chilaquiles
This is a savory vegetarian version of chilaquiles with black beans (which Sam served on the side with hers), and a deep