Home Cooked Bliss

There isn’t anything tremendously difficult about opening a bottle of spaghetti sauce, putting them on the stove to heat and dumping some spaghetti in a kettle of water so I thought my culinary duties would be light last night. However, my daughter who usually cooks her own food because she’s a vegetarian asked me what I was making for her. We didn’t have another jar of spaghetti sauce in the house and there was no way I was making another run to the store so I got inspired and started ransacking the cupboards to see what we had I could make a passable sauce from.

My base was a can of tomato sauce, to that I added some minced garlic and onions. Unfortunately it still looked like a can of tomato sauce with spices so I headed back to the cupboard. A little searching turned up a can of diced tomatoes and some mushrooms which made the jar of tomato sauce look a lot more like spaghetti sauce. The simmering sauce smelled divine, but had an acidic taste. Remember some long ago guidance I’d read in a cook book, I added a few pinches of sugar and tasted it again. It tasted a lot better than a can of Ragu and made me remember the satisfying feeling of creativity that cooking can bring when you don’t slavishly follow someone else’s directions.

Cooking is about more than the raw ingredients you put in the pan, it’s about nurturing and love and about creating sustenance for those you love. There’s something immensely satisfying about the smell of garlic and onion sizzling on the griddle or the warm chocolaty perfume of cookies baking in the oven. Those aromas fill the home with love, security, and bliss.