I want to talk about cooking. I did a lot of cooking before coming to Penn, but I obviously couldn’t keep that up while living in the Quad last year and I sorely missed it. However, one of the few silver linings of this pandemic has been that I’ve been able to cook every day, and I still enjoy it as much as I used to, but I’m enjoying it for different reasons. When I first started cooking in high-school I used to try to test myself by attempting technically difficult or complex dishes and I found that process really satisfying and exciting. When I started cooking again once classes went online last semester, for a variety of different reasons, I didn’t have the luxury of being able to devote that much time to cooking. So, when I was cooking, I was cooking purely to provide a meal in the fastest and most efficient way possible for myself and whoever else was hungry. And that was the majority of the cooking I was doing in high-school as well, but then it was at a much lower volume and it was interspersed with exciting projects to look forward to. I enjoyed it then too, but I preferred the challenges to the everyday stuff. That completely flipped during quarantine – I was cooking pasta dishes one after the other until I could whip them up in 12 minutes flat from opening the cupboard to having the dishes washed and food on the table. And I was getting just as much satisfaction out of making these marginal gains with simple dishes through cooking them over and over again, as I used to from baking a decent batch of profiteroles. And I think if anyone has somehow made it this far without exceeding their pretentious cooking chat threshold, “profiteroles” has almost certainly finished off the job so I think I’ll leave it there.
-John
