Cooking

I was reading a post on a friends blog about cooking and my comment to it made me think of a weird little quirk I have. When I'm not feeling particularly happy with life. Whether I'm anxious about something, or scared about something, or just not feeling up to par, I cook. I've been cooking like a banshee when I've been home the past couple of weeks. I've made banana crumb muffins, blueberry pound cake, oatmeal cookies, scones, crumpets, apple dumplings, shrimp bisque,chocolate chunk cookies, ice cream, been barbequing salmon, steaks, and chicken wings, and a myriad of other items. The weird thing about it is that it's not JUST the cooking that does "it" for me, it's feeding it to someone else and having them appreciate my efforts and feel the love and depth of feeling that I put into a dish or baked good. Lately, since I'm single, I cook, and most of it goes to waste. I try to pawn it off on friends, but that usually backfires because my grandmother grew up in the depression era and has this "thing" about giving food away to strangers....yet..they won't eat most of it because I cook "white people food" go figure. Anywho, I grew up in an italian family (yes, I'm black, stop being confused Bou), and it's damned near impossible to cook in small quantities. You are always prepared to feed a large army or small country, depending on how much freezer/refrigerator space you have. But, in writing my comment on LJ's board, I came to realize "Food IS Love". There is NOTHING compared to rolling out pasta dough by hand, running it through the Atlas pasta machine, cutting out your shapes, filling and rolling up your tortellini into those funny belly-button shapes, EXCEPT for the near orgasmic moans coming from a friend who has never had fresh, home-made HAND-made pasta before. There's nothing like adding that chiffonade of basil to your tomato sauce as a final addition EXCEPT having someone eating your dish of choice asking which brand of spaghetti sauce you used, because it's to die for, only to tell them it's your brand, and not to be bottled or branded because it never turns out the same way twice. Hell, I still get comments about the jambalaya I made for a get-together 2-3 years ago where they offer to give me money to make it again, provided I remember to remove the shells from the shrimp next time. Hahahah, ok, so there have been a few mistakes, but it was still damned tasty. And I doubt that it would have been so tasty if I hadn't taken two days to make it. I created the andouille sausage from scratch, found the largest, freshest shrimp I could find, used hand chopped garlic, and did a myriad of other things to make that dish MINE...When you cook for those you love, you can do nothing less than impart a bit of yourself into a dish and it's that attention to detail involved in creating the final product that makes it so damned good for the cook and their happy, full-bellied diner.