To tell you the truth, I can’t tell whether my wife is a scientist or an artist. If I were pressed on the matter, I’d lean toward the scientist, but a case could be made for both. I watch her cook, and I see the art in it. It’s pretty amazing. But when I look at the prep time that goes into it, we’re definitely in the realm of science.
My wife studies. She’s got notebooks crammed with exact written instructions of what I’m sure are hundreds of recipes and tips for cooking. I’ll walk into the living room and she’ll be in front of the TV watching a cooking show ready to write down everything that’s being said (or take a picture of the screen when the ingredients flash on it). Or she may be sitting there glued to a YouTube video on her phone doing the same.
And then I’ll come home from work, or wake up early and walk out into the kitchen, and I’ll see the remnants of what looks like some kind of experiment sitting on the counter, notebook propped up against the backsplash.
Sometimes it’s a dehydrator. Sometimes a juicer. Sometimes a food processor and a pile of strange looking stuff that looks like pieces of the insulation that you blow into the attic. “What is it?” “Ginger.” It looks nothing like ginger to me. But apparently it makes a good tea…
So about a week ago, we’re in e-mart and she buys up a bunch of fresh-roasted nuts – peanuts, pistachios, and some nut I didn’t even recognize (but it sure tasted good). Then at home, she’s got roasted sunflower seeds (shelled), pine nuts, and cranberries. A couple of days later we go to the commissary and she’s asking me about the best granola.
And then I wake up for work one day and there’s a cookie sheet of one big, beautiful nut bar, ready to cut down into smaller rectangles.
But that’s not the most of it. It’s what she used as the glue to hold it all together – and I still don’t quite understand how she made it. It involved the rendering down of a pureed mixture of freshly-sprouted barley along with a bunch of other stuff. She explained it to me. I mean, she tried. I’d seen her in the kitchen boiling something (to include maybe a big pot of sliced radishes?) and squeezing it out through cheese-cloth. The process was ongoing for a couple of days, but it always looked like she was doing the same thing. In the end she had a good-sized jar (at least a liter) of some thick, brown stuff sitting on the counter. It looked like a light molasses. It tasted very sweet. “Just like my mother used to make,” she assured me. And when she added it to her nut and cranberry mixture, it was incredible.
And then she packed most of it up and sent it to our son. But I’m OK with that, because a trip to Costco this week netted even more nuts, and those are going into whatever else she’s going to make next. The artist in her means she might not make the exact same thing next time, but the scientist in her pretty much tells me it’s going to be good.
This post is one of my favorites, maybe because I’ve seen Micha cook so I get a good mental image