Allen Week 4: My Culinary Origins

    I’ll start this blog off strong: I love food, not just as sustenance, but as art. My parents are very good when it comes to the culinary arts; my mother is great at baking and my father is very good at cooking. I like to think that their love and skill with food has passed down to me. I have seen countless cooking shows, I have refined my palate to detect some of the most minute flavors, and I can cook some very challenging dishes that others struggle to pull off. In other words, I like to think that I know my way around the kitchen, but things were not always this way for me. I used to have a strong hatred of the kitchen and did everything I could to stay away from it, but I always seemed to be drawn back to it for some strange reason.

    This strange reason arose during the beginning of my academic journey, in preschool. My preschool was, as far as I know, very similar to every other preschool. The main thing that we did as budding scholars was go to stations that were placed around the room. Every day, in the morning, the class would pick two little foam cut out shapes that corresponded to a station around the room and we would go to those two stations throughout the day. The green rectangle corresponded with the science station, the red triangle went with the math station, etc. There was one piece that I feared above all else, and that was the white hexagon, the stinking white hexagon that corresponded to the worst station in the entirety of the classroom, the kitchen.

    I hated the kitchen with a burning passion. I was a well-mannered 3 year old, but every time I got the kitchen, I would become very upset, distraught even, but I would suck it up and go stand in the kitchen so that I didn’t get in trouble. The worst part about it though was that I ALWAYS somehow got the white pentagon. The probability of this scenario is extremely low, a 1.87x10-62 probability (yes, I actually spent my time coming up with that calculations, would you expect anything less of me?), but somehow, I kept picking that stinking white pentagon. The kitchen was extremely boring, and my only comfort was that of a spring powered toaster. For some reason, the manufacturers of this toaster had made the springs way too powerful for a child’s play thing, so, naturally, I realized that I could use the toaster as an artillery piece that could reach anywhere in a 20 foot range, which was about half the room. Firing plastic toast at innocent 3 year-olds became my life away from home, until I graduated to kindergarten. I later found out (about a week ago) that my teachers had rigged the system so that I always got the kitchen. The morale of the story is: Sometimes life is rigged, so all you can do is play along. Find your toaster in life and make the best of it.

Young Me Cooking