The Art of Cooking

Something really strange is happening: I can’t cook anymore. I mean, I guess I can still cook but it is not easy and natural anymore. Back home in California it has – at times – been hard to think of something to prepare and I remember frantic searches on the Internet and leafing through cook books just to come up with nothing and then ending up preparing pasta. But I also remember times when we needed dinner and nobody had gone shopping and I just opened the fridge and the freezer and grabbed some stuff and came up with a dinner that everybody – including picky “I hate veggies” geek boy liked. In my blissful memory the latter scenario is much more frequent than the former.

Another day another Schnitzel (c) Tina Baumgartner

And now I am stuck in scenario 1 – pasta with meat sauce. It is literally all I can ever come up with, well there is Schnitzel and sandwiches – but sandwiches don’t count as cooking, really. I wreck my brain to think of what I prepared at home in California and I draw a blank. Pasta? Schnitzel? I know there was other stuff, and it wasn’t sushi because we go out for sushi. Maybe it was fajitas, that must be it and fajitas is really not much of an option here, but then fajitas were prepared every other week at best. So what is different, what turned me into this unimaginative non-cook?

I can only speculate. The kitchen is tiny, I mean “bump into each other when turning around” tiny. Just a few minutes ago I felt like yelling at geek-boy to get the hell out of the darn kitchen because between his dad and myself there simply wasn’t enough space for a third person.

I also don’t have the provisions I have in California where I have stuff in the pantry and the freezer, where I actually have a pantry and a freeze which deserve the names.

Then there is all that German food that I am all of a sudden apparently expected by the world to prepare. I go to the store and find “Sauerbraten” spices (Sauerbraten is a special kind of German roast that is marinated in wine and/or vinegar overnight to make it slightly sour. It is eaten with Knoedel). I haven’t made a Sauerbraten in like – ever, literally and since I moved to the US I made Knoedel once. I mean, seriously, Sauerbraten spices?? The flip side is that I can’t find the stuff I need for survival. Today I was trying to find Tapatio – no luck, neither did I get Tajin, my favorite spicy, limey Mexican spice – and soy sauces comes in tiny bottles.

Of course, one can argue that it is possible to cook without Tajin and maybe it is indeed. I am about to find out.