It‛s interesting to look back on this and realize that it pretty much coincided with a change in my writing. Writing was something that I previously churned out fairly painlessly. I even looked forward to writing a thesis. But as the cooking mojo dried up, so did my writing mojo. Writing the eighty pages of that thesis was one of the most painful things I ever did. I like most of my past work even when it seems juvenile to me, but I can hardly bear to look at the bound copies of my thesis now. (Part of the problem with my writing also had to do with lack of challenges during my final year of masters coursework. Boredom has never worked well for me.)

When we moved to Minnesota this summer, I quit cooking completely. Cereal in the morning was as far as it went. Luckily for me Mister Boyfriend is a good cook in his own right, and he sliced and diced his way through our daily meals. He kept it up after school started. After we got into the routine of the semester, I realized that I was home all day on Thursdays while he was at school for nearly twelve hours. It seemed only right that I should take some sort of a swipe at dinner preparation. So I made things like baked chicken breasts and baked potatoes and steamed broccoli. Then I made some pork chops. Then, in October, a pot of chili. Some cornbread. A pot of greens. When my former professor came, we went to a bookstore closeout and I bought three new cookbooks. I made soup. I made some other soup that my grandma used to make. Then pumpkin muffins. Then pumpkin bread. Then Thanksgiving dinner. Last Sunday night I plated up pan-cooked lemon and garlic chicken with sautéed mushrooms, porcini risotto, and brussels sprouts. Followed it with the tangerine pudding. Yesterday it snowed again, and that meant navy bean and sausage soup with cornbread and Nigella Lawson‛s Easy Sticky-Toffee Dessert.

And correspondingly, my intellectual work has picked up. Coursework is more challenging up here, and I‛m reading and writing a ton. You can certainly see the difference on my blog. I started thinking about the correlation between these things when Profgrrl said something about how it works for her:

Even cooking helps. It seems like the more creative outlets I have, the more energy flowing out, the more words I generate too. I don‛t know why, but I‛m not going to fuck with the system.

That somehow seems about right. I feel like I‛m on baby deer legs here, wondering if I can really cook and write again or if it‛ll all suddenly disappear once more without warning. Have I jinxed it by writing about it? Surely not. Because there‛s all this stuff I want to make, and all these papers I have to write.