When I’m supposed to be grading freshman composition papers, I look up from my desk and the broad faces of the white kitchen cupboards beckon me with their canvas-like blankness and their shelves full of ingredients.  I have the itch to do something with my hands.

 

This inclination to create something started with World Book’s Childcraft Encyclopedia, volume number 13, with the words Make and Do printed down its limesicle green spine.  There were felt appliqué projects, homemade play-doh recipes, directions for Popsicle stick finger-pianos, and macramé plant holders.  Glossy photos of children wearing Afros, bellbottoms, and Technicolor polyester competed with brightly colored cartoons.  Even then—the late eighties—the pictures were rather kitschy, but I didn’t care.  That book saved me from many afternoons of boredom.  By the time I out grew “Make and Do” projects, most of the pages were stained, bubbled and warped with spills, not unlike my cookbook collection today.

 

Now that I’m an adult this obsessive urge to make things has led to a variety of hobbies.  I went through a paper-making phase involving shredding paper from my recycle bin into wet-dog smelling pulp, producing grey blobs of sludge in my kitchen blender.  Other projects were expensive, but largely unsuccessful (jewelry making), or just passing fads (scrapbooking).

 

The one make and do project that I have never outgrown is cooking. While my cooking experience had its humble beginning stirring Kraft Macaroni and Cheese under heavy motherly supervision, it quickly evolved to giving 4-H club demonstrations detailing, meticulously how to make “Ants on a Log” a concoction of celery sticks, peanut butter, and raisins.  My audience—bored, ten-year old Sunshine Girl 4-H Club members—could have cared less about me rambling on like a miniature Julia Child over celery washing, but I was thrilled with a finished product to show for it, even if the “ants” looked like dung beetles.

 

While Childcraft’s Make and Do volume saved me from boredom as a child, cooking saves me in other ways.  After my eyes blur from hours of reading student essays, I walk into the kitchen a somnambulist.  The rhythm of my knife against the cutting board, the sharp bite of garlic in my nostrils, wakes me.  Suddenly, I have moved from cerebral chaos flitting around me like a heavy swarm of gnats, to a purely tactile world that opens all my senses at once, and this world is right in my own kitchen.  The smell of onion, the sound of olive oil sizzling in a pan, the sticky touch of a sprig of fresh rosemary, the taste of the meat before and after salt.  My hands are busy.  My mind is quiet, except for the instinctual whir and hum of the cooking process.  Decisions are made with fluidity:  Yes, a splash of balsamic vinegar in the pan.  No, no carrots in this dish.  Just a pinch of red pepper flakes.  Then there is the speed of it all, the timing.  It requires attention and focus in such a way that I can’t muse on pedagogy or assessment theory.  I am just a cook in front of the glowing blue-gas fire, making and doing.