Cooking

Cooking is messy, and if done right it takes a long time. Most of the time taken in cooking is in the preparation. It takes a while to do things like chopping vegetables and preparing base ingredients.

Case in point, I just spent the entire day boiling a cut up whole chicken to make chicken stock, which is used as a base ingredient in many recipes. For a good hearty chicken stock, the whole chicken is cut up, left on the bone, and cooked for several hours in a simmering pot with various spices, celery, carrots and onions. Most of the ingredients in that stock are prepared, cooked, and then thrown out. They are never used in the final product at all, but are essential for the proper taste of the stock.

Of the chicken itself, about half of it is discarded and the rest of it is shredded off the bones to be used later, often in the same recipes that call for the chicken stock it was used to make. The bones are essential for the flavor of the stock, but they are also discarded after cooking.

At the end of today, after six hours of preparation, I have about 2 1/2 pounds of shredded chicken and a couple of gallons of stock. I will use about half of the chicken and a couple of quarts of the stock to make a chicken vegetable soup that will last us for several days (and will probably have to be frozen because there is only the two of us). The rest of the stock will probably also be frozen and the remainder of the chicken will be used in another recipe. The fruits of my labor today will result in several days of healthy food for me and Mrs Hades.

Cooking is a chore if you don't like doing it. That is why we have canned ingredients and instant meals, loaded with things that JFK Jr heartily disapproves of, like HFCS and preservatives and carbohydrates. These prepared foods makes cooking a lot easier and quicker, and leads to the conundrum that one of the biggest health problem among the nation's poorest people is not malnutrition, but obesity.

I like to cook (mostly because I like to eat, which is a whole 'nother problem), but I don't usually put this much time into it. I would usually use chicken stock off the shelf and maybe a rotisserie chicken from the deli counter at the local grocery store, but I took the week off this week for a factory shut-down so I had the time. Just for fun I looked at the ingredients for a store-bought chicken stock... and then I bought a whole chicken, celery, carrots and onions and made my own.

If you want to eat healthy, you have to cook. But this is not about that. This is about life.

Life, also, takes a lot of time and preparation to do right, and it is often messy, with ingredients that are discarded when their usefulness is at an end. Things like hate and regret, for instance, that serve no purpose but to sour the rest of the ingredients and so ruin the entire dish.

I got my love of cooking from my mother, who has been gone for a whole year as of last Monday. I've thought of her a lot as I prepared my chicken stock, reflecting on the time and effort it takes to prepare hearty meals like she did for the six of us while we were growing up. When we went through her recipe books we found recipes from her mother (my aunt has that book now, as is proper), so it is a family tradition.

 In many ways my mother was still the simple Nebraska farm girl at the end of her life as she was at the beginning of it. She didn't concern herself much with the things she couldn't change, but the things she could change she went after with the unwavering determination that was her birthright. She tended her garden (with us as her plants) and prepared her ingredients with all the skill and determination that eighty years of existence affords, and at the end of that existence the presence of so many lives that she touched in positive ways came to bid her farewell.

I am an amalgamation of my parents. I will never be as good a man as my father is, and I share a lot of characteristics (both good and maybe not so good) from my mother. In the end, I can only hope that I have had as much of a positive influence on those around me as my parents had on those around them.

I miss my mother every day, but even though she is no longer here her presence is everywhere.

In Memoriam

Elizabeth Ann (Roberts) Card

August 11, 1943 - December 2, 2023