Food Glorious Food!

I walked into the kitchen and came face to face with my new enemy—raw chicken! Cooking has always been a foreign concept to me, considering how many hamburger helpers I’ve had to exhaust in order to survive here at BYU. Now, raw chicken in it of itself seems harmless, but when the recipe tells you to “half it”, “sauté it” and make a casserole—your mind turns to mush no matter how many AP credits you’ve earned. Yet, as I grit my teeth and dug that butcher’s knife into to breast of the chicken, I realized “Hey this isn’t that bad, I kind of like cutting open things.” And so, with the assistance of my friend’s brother-in–law, I proceeded to sauté the chicken.

As I continued to cook, the process seemed easy. However, cooking with an aid right by you is hardly the same as cooking by yourself. When you cook by yourself, a whole new level of confidence is required, because once you complete a step in the recipe there’s no going back to fix mistakes. Then there’s the variable of art that needs to be put into cooking. The point where you can look past the methodical aspect to where you add ingredients based on what you feel is what defines a true cook.

Cooking meat has been a common folk knowledge since biblical times a s in the story of Jacob and Esau. As their father Isaac was blind, one of the ways he could distinguish between his sons was by the way Esau prepared his meat. Undoubtedly, Esau would pass on his knowledge of cooking to his children in which that knowledge would churn and evolve even to the present day. I’m grateful to have become a part of the legacy of cooking meat that has withstood for thousands of years.

But the part of the cooking experience that I enjoyed most was the opportunity to socialize. There’s more to just mixing ingredients and forming chemical bonds to make something new. Friendships are born from sharing a meal that has been prepared from scratch. To me, that’s more important than acquiring new folk knowledge.