Kudos if you got the title reference.

Anyway, today I would like to talk about my relationship with Cooking.
I say relationship, it’s not very official yet, we’ve barely had a few dates , a couple of dinners (hey look, a joke) and our time together does not amount to more than a couple of hours.

Although I’ve seen Cooking before, in my own house in Athens, imagine the coincidence. I was either not interested or too intimidated to make an approach.
Embarrassingly enough, my mother tried to arrange a few awkward dates, but I must say, my heart wasn’t into it then.

Recently though, we were re-introduced thanks to Maria, during her latest visit here in Manchester, in much simpler terms than before, and you know what? I can’t continue this analogy between cooking and relationships any more, soon I will have to mention sex and that’s a few short steps from having this blog become an ungodly debauch.

So yea, the past few weeks I have been, in a way, cooking. Up until last month ,cooking was something that only other people did, like driving buses or being President of the United States. If something was not ready to bite, it was not considered food in my book.

Here I am though, buying meat , not processed meat in souvlaki form, no sir, now I buy, pink soft meat, the kind that comes in those packages that are white foamy on the bottom part and have clear plastic on the top bit. I know that for many people these things were always there, but for me, they didn’t even register. If I found myself in a zombie apocalypse and as any logical person, I wound up raiding a supermarket, I would get crisps (see I am becoming a Brit), Coke, probably some fruit, but I would completely ignore any frozen meat stuff.
Using the hob was unthinkable for me, I didn’t even know what a hob was. Microwaving leftovers was the most cooking-y thing I would do. The top part of an oven was just wasted space that could be better used to leave the supermarket bags on.
Using a hob would be meddling with technology I couldn’t possibly understand.

Cook, for your own good Garret.

So I am quite surprised with myself these past few week. Cooking chicken, buying rice (ffs, that is an evolutionary breakthrough for me), even warming up beans and stuff on the hob is something that feels new. It’s not that I enjoy it , not really, I find it quite boring. But I do see the correlation now between being hungry and the stuff I have to to in order to stop being hungry.
I have lived alone before, in Lesvos, and I don’t think I used the kitchen for anything other than keeping all the stuff I did not wan’t in my main room. So what is different now? Is it just that takeaway is more expensive here? Who knows.

So even though most of the time here I am whining that I don’t change fast enough and that I don’t do as many things as I would like (and it’s true, I don’t), let’s have this post here to celebrate one aspect where I do see some change.

Let it be a herald for more.

Also Sprach Chicken

~ Garret