She Could Feed Herself

I woke at 3 AM last night. As Paul Simon sang, I don't expect to sleep through the night, but usually I can get back to sleep after I pee. Not this time, though. 

Neither mindfulness, meditation, nor podcast could get my brain off school. I had signed off my computer the evening before with a lesson plan I felt was less engaging than I wanted it to be, especially given the restraints of distance teaching, and I turned it over as I tossed to get comfortable. 

We are preparing the students to write short personal narratives centered around a food memory, and the plan was to give them several model texts to study and use as examples. Earlier in the day I had searched the archives of this blog for any food-related posts that I could turn into an exemplar for the assignment. Oh, there are plenty of tales of food and cooking, but none that I felt would be right for the kids. 

I reached back in my memory to when I was their age, or perhaps a bit older. Did I even cook then? I wondered.  When did I learn to cook, anyway? And as curious or ridiculous as it seems, I could not remember when or why I learned to cook. My mom was a great cook, and when we moved overseas I went away to boarding school in Switzerland, then a few years later, college. 

For most of my teens and early twenties I ate in the dining halls nine months of the year and never even had access to a working kitchen until the fall semester of my junior year. But then? I cooked, and it was full meals with a little help from my roommate's Joy of Cooking. I didn't even get a meal plan, and I never had one again even through graduate school. 

In high school, our dorm room had a room with a sink and a stove that didn't heat properly, but no refrigerator. There was one thing that I could cook on that stove. Some days, I would walk to the tiny store that was in the cobbled square behind our school and buy 1 egg and 1 roll delivered fresh from the bakery in town. A little butter saved from breakfast in the one skillet that was stored in the oven and some patience would yield a perfect egg sandwich. 

Bread, butter, and eggs made just as I liked them: it was a dish I couldn't get in the dining room or any restaurant in town. No one made it for me, and eating it offered an enormous sense of comfort and home.

I guess that's when I became a cook.