Awesome breakfast

Posted on July 18, 2009

Lately I’ve been working on improving my “quality of living”. It’s been a long time coming actually. With the year I’ve had at grad school, I often felt that even though technically I have all the elements “on paper” to live a good life, I’ve been unable to actually make that happen. I’ve learned a great number of things over my recent trip to Europe, and the most important of them is that life gives you what you put into it. Give it passion and freedom and it boomerangs right back at you with happiness and adventure.
The major thing that I learned though, was in the South of France. The art of living slowly, eating well and making grand things out of the most understated elements. That actually all goes hand in hand. When I came back, I took the time to read Milan Kundera’s book, “La lenteur” (Slowness), in which he writes that speed is directly linked to the will of forgetting. He takes the example of a motorcyclist who, on the highway, with the speed of his bike, forgets everything about his life, for there is just him, the road, the wind… speed makes him forget about all of his life’s stresses and leaves him in an intense meditative state. On the opposite end of the spectrum, he talks about the slowness of medieval courting and how every calculated pause adds intensity to the experience of the lovers.
In most big cities around the world, slowness is almost nonexistent. Between the “Métro, boulot, dodo”, and the amount of up keeping required to make life go on (groceries, cleaning, laundry, etc.) there isn’t much time left for actual breathing or slowness. Every moment of our lives is so saturated with our “to do” lists that there isn’t any room left for any sort of poetry or for the ecstasy of simply living to creep up on us. Is this really living? I wonder. If so, why do such full lives actually end up feeling empty to most people?
Well, to make a long story short… eating is one of the things that we tend to do much too fast I think. Not only do we eat fast, but we don’t take the proper time to actually enjoy the experience of making real food happen. Not that this should be a complicated endeavor or that it should take hours at every meal… but I feel that a lot of the times, there’s absolutely no passion that goes into it.

Lately, I’ve been allowing myself to let go (meaning REALLY letting go of all the other things that should get done) and indulge into the experience of cooking. This, to me means forgetting all the work I have to do, forgetting about the cleaning that comes afterward, forgetting that what I’m doing is actually taking time. At that point, I stop thinking of food as something that I know. I don’t think about “meals” I’ve eaten in the past and things I’ve liked. I think of possibilities of food as a blank page. I take my reusable bag, my wallet, my keys and head to the grocery store. When I get there, I look at prices mainly. I go for the cheapest items (because I’m pretty poor these days) and imagine what good can come of them. Since it’s summer, there’s a lot of great deals to be had out there.
This morning, I looked into my fridge, and to my great delight, there was a lot of individual things left over from my week’s bargain shopping, just demanding to me eaten. A single potato, some zucchini, cherry tomatoes, eggs, garlic, spring onions… mmm… then add to that some breakfast sausages I had in the freezer and a piece of baguette… and there we go.
I honestly didn’t know where I was going with this, but as I was listening to CBC Radio 1, I let myself forget that time was going by and just let myself be creative with what I had. To my utter delight and excitement, I actually ended up creating one a great meal like I’ve been longing to make… As I saw the potatoes starting to brown in the pan, and the tomatoes mix in with the zucchini and green onions, I got overwhelmed with joy from all of those beautiful colors that started appearing in the said pan. Well, as it turns out, the food tasted just as wonderful as the experience of making it was. Ah, the joys of food. It takes time to make magic happen in the kitchen… or maybe it’s just a matter of forgetting about the existence everything else in the world for those moments and making a meditations out of it. Letting yourself be saturated with the slowness of the experience… The French, with their 2 hour lunch breaks, truly have one up on us, for they have actually realized that food isn’t only about fueling up the body and making hunger disappear, it’s about actually enjoying the experience of eating and allowing ourselves the necessary time to make that happen.
Vive la France!