Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all. ~ Harriet Van Horne

It’s funny, because I’m a single guy and too many people have a sitcom level of understanding of the complexity of life, people are often shocked that I cook. As if I’ve spent the nearly forty years of my adult single life eating out every night. In fact, I cook nearly every night.

I love to cook, mostly because I love to eat, that’s something most people figure out about me in the first glance. I’ve been overweight since I was seven, not because I eat badly, but because I eat too damn much. But I love food, I love making it, I love eating it, it is definitely the place I find my comfort in this life. As a nomad, far too few of the people I care about are close to me, the price you pay as a nomad. But I can cook and eat where ever I am, and I do. There’s a line from a book or a movie, I can’t remember exactly where. The character says, I am a man of large appetites and this applies to me. I’m a man of limited appetites, but where they exist they are large and deep.

Like most cooks, I thoroughly enjoy cooking for people, but my solitary life leaves me few opportunities to do so. Part of the reason I’ll be moving east in a couple of years, will be to have more opportunities to cook for people I care about and like. The simple fact is, that if I have ever cooked for you, I dearly care about you.

As you are also quite aware if you read this blog regularly, I also love to garden. Eating food I have grown is a special things for me. When I can combine the two, the joy becomes exponential. My mother’s family is Italian and one of the many reasons I love growing tomatoes, is the opportunity to make tomato sauce from tomatoes I’ve grown. My time in California has also brought me to really enjoy making salsa from my own garden. When I owned my house in Loomis and had a quarter acre to grown on, I grew my own tomatoes, peppers, cilantro and so when I made salsa it was from everything I’d grown.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, I think because I’ve been a bit lonely. I’ve been cooking a lot, stews, curries, last night I made chili. Cooking makes me happy, I hope you have something to make you happy today my friends. ~ Rev Kane