I cooked myself a meal for the first time for ages tonight. I have got into the habit of having microwave meals (mainly nice, but low fat ones from M&S. Oooooh, I've changed) or takeaways or the occasional bowl of pasta and pesto (that's not cooking, it's just a posh Pot Noodle, but you have to wash up afterwards).
Tonight I felt like a change so cooked a massive and healthy lean beef chilli, with lots of fresh chillies and lots of garlic (which is still emanating from my pores almost 24 hours later).
I had forgotten how therapeutic cooking can be. It really cheered me up, both preparing and eating it.
I spend all day creating jokes (or at least attempting to) but that is never as satisfying as creating something that is real, that can be touched and (even better) eaten. It just feels like more of an achievement.
Jokes about boxes aren't going to feed the starving children of Africa and let's face it, neither is my big wok full of chilli, but you know what I mean.
In actual fact the comedians of this country have probably done more for the starving people of Africa than the chefs, but that's why you should never overanalyse your own statements (or at least think more carefully about them before you make them). I'd just like to be more practically creative, that's all I'm saying.
Are we all doomed to want to be good at the things we can't do, whilst not appreciating the things that we're OK at?
Yes we are. As dooms go, it's not a bad doom.
It's a shame that a good chilli is basically the only thing I can cook, because it would be nice to invite people over for dinner. But unless I want to invite over a load of 18 year old male students, then a hot chilli is of no use to me and the social world that I so covet.
I don't want to invite around a load of 18 year old male students. You are never coming to my nice house with your turn-ups full of toast crumbs and your Marmity fingers.
I wouldn't mind learning to cook something that would get a load of 18 year old female students into my house.
But it would take years to learn to prepare such a feast and after all that time it would be annoying to have a load of waifs in my house saying they couldn't possibly eat it because they have fat ankles. I would undoubtedly throw the selfish youngf hussies out and all my work would have been for naught.
It might be fun to learn to be a bit better at cooking so I could have some of my adult, married friends around and allow them to subtly belittle my single, childless status. So maybe I'm going to have to take a cookery course or something. Hey if I got good enough I could bring out a book and have my own TV show and a series of adverts with loads of actors pretending to be my (non-existant?) friends and Tom Binns being my brother-in-law.
If you know any good cookery courses in West London then let me know. But I want the adult dinner party ones, not the willowy, fussy teenage girl ones that everyone's attending these days.
