Sarah Brown once said she had a theory that for every single person on the planet, there’s a sentence that if it were said to them by the right person or at the right time with the right words, everything in their life would right itself from that point forward. (If I remember correctly, my sentence was “Wow, you don’t dance like a white girl at ALL.”)
Nearly seven years ago, my best friend bought me a subscription to Martha Stewart Living magazine as holiday present. Tearing open the wrapping paper, I caught a glimpse of a pyramid stack of rigidly squared off Rice Krispy Treat-style cereal bars on one of those ever-upbeat and brightly lit covers I recognized all too well and protested, “But I don’t read Martha Stewart!”
“Of course you don’t,” she said. “Of course not.”
I’ve heard so many people say that they don’t understand the purpose of wedding registries. “Can’t we just have the cha-ching?” they ask, “Who needs all that crap?” And I’m here to say, as a person who loves to cook, “I do.” Yes, to the Kitchen Aid. Yes to the carved oak salad bowl set. Yes to the entire Cuisinart family from the Griddler and food processor to the ice cream maker and hand blender. I’m actually going to use all of this stuff, too.
I think that the basic instinct that gets us in the kitchen “after all those messy sustenance issues have been attended to” is a deep-seated desire to make something taste a little better than the way we’ve come to accept it. It’s why there are ten thousand crab cake recipes and a line of followers behind each, and it’s why everyone has an idea carved into their base philosophy of the way corn bread is supposed to taste (and most of it fails to please because it’s not as savory/rich, sweet/cakey or textural/salty as they believe pone was intended to be). I’d also argue that this is why few bother to make their own ketchup, as Heinz figured out a long time ago what most of us expect of it and why reinvent the wheel?
I blame the ubiquitous sandwich shop offering for vegetarians, “roasted fall vegetable wrap, coated with gobs of salad oil and not a droplet of originality” (fine, I’ve embellished that last part), for the fact that until two years ago I ate not a lick of eggplant. That, and eggplant parmesan, but my rant about melted cheese-coated things – and my husband’s baffled expression when he learned of this blasphemy – for another time.
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