Culinary Meditation

She sent me the recipe. My delightful friend who sends me messages that from a distance seem random but up close minister to so many nooks and crannies of who I am, who I might become, who I just want to watch from a distance with rabid curiosity. She sends me music, and tips about travel, and snippets of her life…and she sent me a recipe. 

“Big woo, one more spaghetti sauce recipe in the world,” you could say. “Tomatoes and garlic, how different can a sauce be,” you might ask. And I might agree with you. I don’t usually eat red sauce except in lasagna or over chicken Parmesan (a dish I haven’t made in years...hmmm). but something about this recipe struck. Actually, two things about this recipe struck me. Three quarters a cup of peel whole garlic cloves and roughly four hours of cooking.

Let me repeat myself: ¾ cup of peeled whole garlic cloves and four hours of cooking. 

I’m impatient in a lot of ways. Meditation has proved challenging for me not because I must be quiet but because I can’t do anything else. I can’t read, I can’t write, I can’t even really think because “thoughts should come easy and then be brushed aside so that my mantra can return.” In the mornings I can sit quietly. Not completely awake, almost touching sleep, it is a pleasant way to transition into daylight. Meditation retreats also work for that because that is the point of being wherever I am…to retreat into mediation. But in the midst of my day?

There are only so many hours and most of them are already betrothed to other things. Sleep and work and transportation. Time and attention and energy can be slim.

But recently, I’ve turned to cooking. Real cooking. Scratch cooking. 

From scratch cooking is something I typically only do when I’m living overseas; and then I do it mostly out of necessity. Uganda was wonderful in a lot of ways but it had the worst bread – and so I baked bread in a makeshift Dutch oven (because we only had two gas burners on a table), fresh pita bread, pineapple upside-down cake. In South Africa I made samosas, cinnamon buns, bagels. The list goes on. Whatever I hanker for I figure it out. 

But the time factor. 

Back here in the US and there are so many other ways I can occupy my time. And so I eat out and I purchase processed side dishes that allow me to come home drained and still eat. Or I cook a one pot meal because it is fast and easy. Same motivations apply. 

But slowly but surely I’ve been warming to the cooking. I played around with soups this winter, lately I’ve been trying to reduce my meat intake. And now I’m starting to enjoy the process more. Even when I don’t have company in the kitchen as I did in New Zealand. 

A few weeks ago I assembled all the necessary spices and made enchilada sauce and assembled black bean and sweet potato enchilada casserole (I layer instead of roll because…well because it doesn’t take as long). Then this week I made cheese, lentil, and kale enchiladas (I even rolled them properly).

Zilla sent me the spaghetti sauce recipe last year sometime I think. I tucked it away and always planned to make, some homebody-Saturday when I wanted to perfume the house with fragrance of garlic. I never did.

But yesterday at the grocery store the idea hounded me and today I finally excavated the recipe from the recesses of my email. Against good common sense, I started the recipe at 5:30. After work. Unfed. Planning not for spaghetti but for lasagna. 

Two hours in, I realize I’ll have to make alternative plans. Shrimp is thawing on my counter and I’ll work something out there, but still I’m contended. 

Have you ever watched two heads worth of garlic brown slowly in a cup of olive oil? Watched the small bubbles form under the thin membrane that holds garlic together? Inhaled the gentle scent of garlic being released into oil? Watched it brown slowly beneath the occasional stir of your spoon?

I just did.

I don’t have all the right tools. Instead of an immersion blender (and too lazy to transfer the sauce into the blender) I used a hand mixer, splattering garlicky tomato droplets across my shirt, a hot spatter on my flip-flopped foot, on the floor. It is chunkier than the recipe calls for but I’m ok with that. 

Tasting the mid-recipe product – there are still two hours of simmering on low ahead of me – I’ll make some changes next time. I’ll use less oil. Maybe I’ll remove the garlic a hint earlier. There is some flavor that feels like it is missing…but all of that is in pursuit of perfection.

In this moment, the silky tomato still warm on my lips, the garlic penetrating every corner of the sauce, I am sated. 

Tonight I’ll assemble my lasagna, ready to throw into the oven when I get home tomorrow night. But for tonight…tonight I’m simply basking in this mediation of cooking without much thought to the time.