By Ron Hickerson, Chief Reporter
Everyone always tells my wife she’s lucky she married a chef.
No one expresses how lucky she is more than my wife herself, because she does not enjoy cooking. While she says I make delicious food (I’m not talking Top Ramen here), what she said she enjoys most about my cooking is the pleasure I take from it. So once we moved into our new house, the kitchen became my domain. Now, I set everything up the way it should be, I look for the tools I need to create cuisine in our small kitchen, and I dream about new appliances and gadgets that would make my life as a cook so much easier.
As for where my love for cooking started, I’d say that cooking is in my blood.
After my dad died, I asked my mom how I’m like him. She said I mainly reminded her of him because he, too, loved to cook.
You could always tell when Dad was in the kitchen, though it was a full-sensory experience. Sure the kitchen would smell like whatever he was making, but his cooking was also an assault on the ears. As a deaf man, my dad didn’t understand the need for a soft hand in the kitchen, so the house filled with the sounds of banging pots and pans and slamming cabinet doors. To see him flailing around in the kitchen was also pretty entertaining, though you dared not get too close.
What I remember most about my dad is him making breakfast. Dad went into work pretty early weekday mornings, so my sister and I would not see him before going to school. But on days that we both had big tests, my dad would have made giant breakfasts consisting of pancakes, toast, eggs and bacon, always with notes wishing us luck on our tests doodled on our napkins.
But every Saturday morning Dad would involve me and my sister in the kitchen. He would wake us up and take us to the kitchen in order to help him make breakfast for the family. He would take out our blue, plastic step-stool that was tall enough to help us reach the stove, and we would help him by putting bread and frozen Eggo Waffles in the toaster oven, cracking eggs into mixing bowls, and scrambling and pouring the yellow liquid into the hot pan, swirling the spatula the pan around slowly so as to not get egg everywhere on the kitchen counters. It’s always been one of my favorite memories.
Ever since middle school when I began cooking whole meals on my own, I spend a lot of my free time trying to perfect my craft in the kitchen, whether it be by searching online for a new recipe taking notes from my cooking Godfather, Alton Brown, or trying to solve the culinary puzzles with the contestants on shows like “Chopped” and “Iron Chef America.”And that drive has often taken my mind off of my school work and stress from my day at work, giving me a task to focus on and an excitement to see the faces of whoever I’ll be serving.
The point of this column (if you’ve stayed with it so far) is that hobbies are important. It wasn’t until recently that I thought of my cooking as a hobby because I thought hobbies were required to be impractical. But the key is to find something that you enjoy doing in your spare time – something that you’re already decent at so you don’t have to go and take classes for your hobby, which can add stress instead of alleviating it. An added tip is to find a hobby that includes people and creates community because, for me, nothing is as peaceful as doing something I love with family.