So, how’s your relationship with your kitchen coming along? Simple enough question, right? Do you enjoy cooking or do you expect your appliances and gadgets to do all the work for you? Just asking. Just curious.
But, really, do you cook in your kitchen or just reheat, use your dishes and fill the dishwasher?
How often do you cook a meal with ingredients that are whole, not washed, bagged and ‘ready to use’?
As you can see I don’t have a particularly pretty kitchen, but I have it set-up to use. I enjoy that about my kitchen; I love to see my tools and work stations. I love to know what the mess I am making will eventually, create. It’s all part of the process.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote a little book, about the benefits of home cooking, Inspired Home Cooking (no surprise) detailing the highlights of this blog, now going into its’ fourth year. It’s simple, not very pretty, but inspirational as far as making a connection with your kitchen and making home cooking a priority. I will probably be talking about this until my last breath – Because I think it’s important!
How can such a simple human act have such significance? How can it be a humanitarian act, as I have said before? At this point in our society, we can change our life by the simple act of cooking. By how we treat ourselves we will show thousands of years from now what kind of people we were.
My book begins with, ‘Cooking is not a spectator sport’. Why? Because it is an action we must participate in to gain the benefits from – nourishing our bodies and souls. Without participating we lose the nourishment for our souls, society and the communities in which we live. Having our foods, processed and ready-to-eat just so we can veg after a long days work, because we deserve not to have to do such a good thing for ourselves and our families as cook a nourishing meal. This is not something we came up with ourselves, it has all had to do with sales, industry, product placement and emotional manipulation to connect us to products to, supposedly, make our lives easier, which by the way, has done nothing more than screw us up.
Cooking is an extension of ourselves and our quality of life depends on it, ultimately showing our own self-respect.
Love is an action, an activity. – M. Scott Peck
For the love of God, please cook, because, it is a significant, simple and important thing to do.
~Julie
Inspired Home Cooking 