The Joy of Cooking

My husband gave me an article to read recently. It came from Fast Company and was about finding one’s passion. The author actually coined her own word “thrillprint” to describe the activity that completely engages and thrills you. The one that grabs you, takes you in, immerses you in a flow and makes time seize to exist.

For me, I immediately thought “reading and writing”. Reading has always been my favorite activity from the time I can remember anything. Writing became a life saver in my early twenties when expressing myself on paper seemed the only way to make sense of the chaos in my mind. So I was not surprised by those two whispered choices.

But then The Voice added “cooking”. I did not grow up cooking. Which is very surprising given that my mother is very old school and insisted that my two older sisters be fully trained in the domestic arts. But when I came along, she just let me be and being for me was being ensconced somewhere in the house with my nose in a book. But maybe as a young widow with 5 children to raise, she just did not have the energy to make and enforce the rules and blueprints of her early forays into parenthood.

I only started cooking in earnest when I left my home in Dakar at age 15 to study in the United States. Besides fried eggs, I had 2 recipes in my repertoire: chicken yassa with onions, lemon and olives and lamb curry. These 2 dishes I learned probably by osmosis from the few times I may have made my way into the chicken while class was in session. However, mastery only came through years of trial and error. Throughout college, I stuck to my 2 go-to dishes, continuously experimenting on my willing friends. When I landed in New York as an investment banking analyst, I worked such long hours that oatmeal was all I “cooked” and even then, the microwave did all the heavy lifting.

It was not until I moved to Washington D.C to a more “normal” job and a larger apartment that I started experimenting with food again. With time, I started to realize that I really could not feel time pass when I was absorbed in creating or following a recipe. The joy of cooking was finally revealing itself to me. My love for the kitchen grew with year after year of botched recipes and small culinary triumphs.

Today I like to think of myself as an enthusiastic home cook with a long list of dishes, tricks and techniques to learn on the road to mastery. What I have learned along the way is that passion need not be loud, either in its revelation or in its expression. I find that over the years mine just slowly lay one on top of the other, like sediments gradually building a mountain. So if your passion does not reveal itself with thunderous confidence, keep tinkering, keep trying new things and keep listening for the whisper.