This is an explication of one of my bemushroomed Pearls of Trite:

Explication of "Nibble while you cook" - "art of food" - "pekw" - "eating alchemy"

To Cook or ripen.. pekw is the IndoEuropean root for cook (from Calvert Watkins Am Her Dict of IndoEuropean Roots).. the derived words mean cooking, ripening, and digesting.. ((** see bottom of post for more linguistic fun.))

One of the things I have learned how to do is to really get in tune with cooking, to be happier and more mindful cooking than while doing most any other regular activity. I have found that cooking while tripping reminds me of how connected I can be to the experience of preparing food and how far I still have to go in learning how to pay attention to the needs of my body.

One thing my father used to say that's stuck with me is: "your body knows what it needs".. true true if its working right.. Cooking while tripping is an experience which hammers this home.. what I need, what I want, what I dont want all crystalize into reality as facts instead of vague unsurities..

The process of eating, for me, is often one of Munching from boredom .. especially while I "work" (or whatever sitting at a desk doing virtually nothing should be called). In my opinion, one Right Way to prepare food for eating is to make the preparation a long process..

Get out candles, turn off the bright lights.. Get a stool or a chair and a glass of wine/fruit juice and sit in the kitchen for a while.. think about foods and notice my reaction to them.. do I want something fatty, oily, vegetabley, lettucey, soupy, ricey.. how have I been feeling lately? heavy? light? strong flavors.. think about spices.. oregano.. basil? thyme.. garlic.. ginger.. If I dont remember what these smell/taste like, I get em out and smell em or throw a little in my mouth. Things start to come together.. I've never really cooked from recipes.. my mother taught me to use recipes as a way to get the creative juices flowing but only follow em if thats exactly what you want and you are on your way to the store.. otherwise you make do with what you've got.

I start something cooking (rice, beans, water heating, whatever) and pick out a few things that seem like what I want and set them on a cutting board.. chop a few things.. stop.. nibble everything you put in or out.. bits of uncooked rice.. smell the dry rice before you put it in the pot.. taste the water.. nibble a carrot.. taste the uncooked corn.. a bit of garlic and a bit of miso paste.. sit back and decide what should go together..

Sit quietly and enjoy the steam from the pot, the butter in the wok.. sip wine..

When we do this, dinner is always fantastic.. the whole experience.. whenever I make it just about food going into the gullet, the food has far less energy, I overeat, I eat nasty things..

Its enormously relaxing and healing for me to spend time with food, but I dont do it often enough.. why? cause Im a pig and a workaholic-cum-slacker.

anyway.. one of the things that I often wish I could share with people is the experience of this.

happy foods,
Y

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1. Assimilated form (in Italic and Celtic) *kwekw- in Latin coquere, to cook: cook, cuisine (culinary), kiln, kitchen, quittor, apricot, biscuit, concoct, decoct, precocious, ricotta.

2. Greek pepon, ripe: pepo.

3. Greek peptein, to cook, ripen, digest (> peptos, cooked): peptic, drupe, eupeptic, pepsin, peptone, pumpkin.

4. Greek -pepsia, digestion: dyspepsia.

5. Sanskrit pakva-, ripe: pukka. [Pok. peku 798].