A recipe is the soul of the cook, written down in physical form. When you use it, you recreate that moment where something was born from nothing– like a mini Big Bang that you can control.
Cooking isn’t set in stone like many believe, it’s a constant flight of exploration even for the “experts.”
So if you take a kid who’s already not eating the best diet, which is probably causing slight behavioral problems from sugar highs and lack of nutrients, but nothing that’s easy to differentiate from typical toddler (or hey, teenager) behavior, and then add something else on top of it, like a widely known and “accepted” allergy medication, at what point does the straw break the camel’s back?
…At what point is the kiddo being affecting by all these little behavior-changing inputs so much that they’re acting like a whole different person?
…The next time a kid loses their shit or is just being an absolute mindless raging ass, pause to ask the question- are they fully in control? Are their bodies being given the right building blocks to mentally succeed and allow the choice of good behavior? Is cardboard food sparking behavioral changes that we then medicate to fix, and keep cycling down from there.
…where is the root value in how we’re spending our time, and should more of it be used making better food?
…we adults lose our minds when someone treats us differently because of our gender or skin color, but in a restaurant we immediately segregate our children with crap food and lowered expectations and think it’s normal; do the math.
…when we’re told we can’t have something, even if it’s something we didn’t want, we tend to falsely value it more.
…we can’t shift the burden of those desires to recapture past freedoms onto the people around us by bringing our kiddos somewhere we, deep down, know we probably shouldn’t.
…but we can find a middle ground of respecting the space of non-parents (or solo parents), and also seeing if parents in a bind need a few minutes of help and kindness. Or even just patient understanding.
On a larger scale my goal is to produce, and to make creation possible for other people by removing the burdens that can clutter up the mind in the kitchen and surrounding food.
However, we put pressure on ourselves as home cooks to be good at cooking all categories because our society doesn’t have a specific genre we focus on. Italian one night, Indian the next, then maybe Mexican? Thai? Chinese? French (classic)? The magnifying glass is on us to consistently produce variety and have it all taste great, even though some of these cuisines require significant experience to do well without having been directly taught.
Peel & Cleaver 