Cooking, complicated

In which I also discuss head injuries

In my early 20s, I cooked for myself all the time. I had a strict food budget, so I ate lentil soup several times a week. (I made a delicious lentil soup, great with sourdough.) Nowadays, with no one to cook for, a little more disposable income, and a bad habit of waiting until the last minute to plan dinner, I am more inclined to eat takeout or an embarrassingly easy variation on cow’s milk, like “quesadilla”, “Yogurt” or “Protein powder in cow’s milk.” Lately, in an effort to return to adulthood and save money, I’m cooking. This was a mistake.

Another thing that I did at lot in my early 20s was get hit in the head. It didn’t feel like a lot of concussions—for years I was quick thinking and quick recovering. But once I got my first really bad concussion, (and finished the hockey game, then the weekend tournament) the hits kept coming, rapidly increasing their severity and the odds of me settling for a cliche like “the hits kept coming.”

One of the first things I noticed about my really bad concussion, the can’t-remember-which-state-you’re-in, have-to-quit-rugby concussion, was that it disrupted cooking. What used to be a one step process—cook an egg—had shattered into eight painstaking steps. (First get a pan. Then get butter…)

Concussions hurt your working memory, or short term memory—the number of ideas you can hold simultaneously. At that time, I considered holding lots of ideas simultaneously my strength as a writer. It was like every idea had tendrils spreading out to other ones, and I could see them as I wrote. I’m not sure how this helped—maybe I saw concepts in each paragraph connect? I might even have been misguided enough to think I could make everyone else see the connections I envisioned, without, you know, articulating them. The point is, my whole procedure for getting things done depended on my ability to remember a lot of ideas, in my head, at once. I was extremely disorganized, and only effective because one thing that stressed me out would remind me of the rest of my to-do list. I might start a soup boiling, do some pushups, chop the onions, run to my room for something, come back to stir…

I made nods at organization. I had a relatively strict routine that revolved around work and rugby practice. I scratched out lists of every imaginable lifetime goal on scraps of paper and then lost them. I was in a hurry, and I tried to do everything at once, and it only worked out by the seat of my pants.

Once my brain was busted, the old habit of just “you’ll remember to do it because you care about it” went out the window. Working memory decreases as you get older, so my system wouldn’t have lasted, but losing it all at once was a blow. I had a lot of work, and my old way of dealing with it was no longer viable. Multi-tasking just wasn’t an option, and I didn’t know any other way. It was like someone had turned off the background sounds of my mind.

There were close calls with cooking at first, mostly saved by my darling of girlfriend, or later by my roommate. When I lived in Montana, we had a detached garage, and it was very easy to preheat the oven and then go to plug my motorcycle into the trickle charger…and then notice some socket wrenches that need organizing and then hear “did you need this oven on?” and rush back to put in the sourdough. It only happened once or twice. But I learned to cook differently. I adapted. Sometimes it felt like all of life was a night of drinking, when it takes all your willpower just to hold yourself together.

The trouble with drinking, I’m finding in my old age, is that I don’t often do it, so I forget that I have to hold myself together. In college it came with so many rules—no calling people, make sure you eat, drink lots of water, when you don’t see a reason to stop is when it’s time to stop, blah blah blah. You had to learn to distrust yourself. I don’t have the energy for that anymore, so I just rarely drink.

It’s been so long since I’ve cooked multi-step meals, I forgot to distrust myself while cooking.

Returning from the gym this morning, I found a pot of gelatinous chicken stock on the porch, where I’d left it to cool before a Halloween camping trip. I figured November weather had essentially served as a refrigerator while I was camping, so I gave it a quick boil to reset the bacteria. (As an expert food scientist, I can assure you that this is how leftovers work. Do you have a raw ingredient? You have two weeks to cook it, and then it’s a new dish—the leftover clock resets, starting another two weeks. Giovanna disagrees with this completely. She believes leftovers are bound by something called a “three day rule” which sounds to me like Brazilian voodoo superstition. She claims there’s a study.)

After a quick shower, I noticed an email about the garbage bill. I put it in my spreadsheet and texted our shares to Mike. Then I checked the other bills. Then I checked the online news. Then the smoke alarm went off. The chicken stock now has absolutely no bacteria. It’s more of a chicken charcoal. Also the house smells like smoke. Or it did. I opened all the doors and windows, and at 7pm, with temperatures falling, they’re still open. A remediation pro came over for an estimate and told us that since it’s just protein smoke, we only need to clean all the surfaces to get the smell out. Luckily, it was a stainless steel pot, so there aren’t carcinogens in the drapes, just collagens.

Just to be sure, I’ll be spending the weekend cleaning with the windows open. And I’ll cook with a diligent procedure, and suspicion fit for the gravity of my task.