I told a friend awhile back that I cook the way other people knit, and I notice more and more that it’s true. I’ve always cooked for a variety of reasons, but a shift has happened in the year since I’ve finished my exams: the cooking has become more important than the eating. Last week in Arkansas, when my parents and I finally arrived home after scattering Grandpa’s ashes, I unthinkingly wandered straight to the kitchen, did the dishes, shooed away my mother, re-organized all of her canned goods, and then whomped up a pot of cream of tomato soup and three different kinds of melty sandwiches according to everyone’s specifications. When Mister Husband picked me up at the airport last Saturday, he asked me where I wanted to go from there. I just wanted to go home, and once there I cooked a huge breakfast of potatoes-and-onions, soy sausage, biscuits, and eggs over easy. Being busy in the kitchen is my way of being still. Quiet, useful motion stills the mind. And it’s a way of being together, of engaging with the larger world. All week, we’ve been trading off two-night dinner shifts, since both of us have so many ideas for meals right now. At Mister Husband’s suggestion, we’re trying to move away from the American model of food hoarding, instead shopping daily or every other day for the freshest items for that night’s dinner.

Cooking-as-a-way-of-communing also seems to have seeped into my friendships. C. ( a longtime foodie) and I have spent many Saturdays scavenging our ways through the cities’ Farmer’s Markets and specialty stores. And I’ve developed a habit of showing up at G’s house at 7 am on our writing days, long knives in tow, and elbowing my way into his kitchen. (He’s the crepe and granola king, though. I wouldn’t even presume.)

I’m not a particularly fancy cook. I just putter along with whatever I think is interesting. It’s meditation and it's chemistry. Lately there have been a hundred pots of soup in the house, made by both of us: beef stew, posole, dairy-free butternut squash. We were talking yesterday about how soup is marvelous because of the building process: browning, sweating, boiling, simmering. You get to chop things in four different ways. You get to extract essences to make stock. Whatever it is that I’m making, there’s a certain point where I start to wonder what would happen if I do THIS. Or THAT.

What the hell. Cleaning up isn’t what hard and I rarely have to throw things out. The problem is what to do with all the food. Two people can only eat so much, especially since we don’t always both like the same foods. And so I am already becoming an old Southern cook like my grandma, giving food away to friends and neighbors. I don’t know anyone else who does this anymore, but I’ve been foisting apple butter on everybody, taking the CSA turnips to my neighbor, hauling containers of soup down the street.

I like this. It suits me. And it’s becoming part of my larger process in ways I can’t quite explain yet. This weekend is a collaborative beef stew, two days in the making. I’m thawing bones to build the stock today, which I’ll turn over to Mister Husband. I cannot wait.