Food for more thought

I was telling someone a short while ago that it was far more fun to think about cooking something than eating it. He was rather amazed, saying that that in itself was a sign of a craving for food and that I was allowed to eat what I cooked, but in limited amounts, to deal with what seemed to be an issue with blood sugar in my system. And I told him, with my usual insouciance and laissez faire air, that what I cooked was not in the least bit what I was interested in eating, never mind that it was generally delicious and often even identifiable.

And so it has almost always been. Right through the week I see food, not as something I want to consume, but as something I could create for others to eat. And so it was last weekend. I was taking a couple of days off to help Father with heavily bandaged Small Cat, who had just had an operation and wanted someone with her all the time or else she would cry sadly or stagger from room to room in search of someone who would cuddle and coochie with her. So I decided to get creative and make the usually irascible boss happy by feeding him something I had already told him I would make for him at some nebulous time in the future: banana bread. In fact, as I sat outside the vet’s surgery waiting for him to be done with Small Cat, Father strode out into the heat and rain to find all the ingredients for the baking task I had set myself for the next day.

So even as Small Cat lay half-asleep on my bed, occasionally cheeping feebly for attention, I sequestered myself in the kitchen and started measuring, mixing and, once in a while, swearing. I was making two batches of the banana bread, one for the office, one for home, and wanted each to be as good as the other, though they would obviously have different sentiments attached to each stir. I sifted flour and blended sugar and butter, I whipped eggs and mashed bananas, I tipped in nutmeg and a splash of brandy just for fun. And I sorted raisins and, in lieu of the walnuts that aforementioned irascible boss wanted, threw in handfuls of pine nuts, which I had carefully stashed away in the deepest recesses of my refrigerator. And, finally, the pan went, first once and then a second time, into the oven to cook while we got on with the rest of the day. The baked loaves came out of the oven dark gold-brown and redolent of nutmeg, bananas and sweetness and were carefully left on trays to cool, then wrapped in foil, one for eating that night with delicious vanilla ice-cream, the other to be carried to work.

And it was worth all the effort. The loaf I took to work was consumed faster than I could have read the recipe and what I made for Father and me is still being savoured, slice by fragrant slice. The ice-cream, however, is disappearing rather quicker, to help us deal with the heat of the in-between-rainbursts times.