I moved out of my parents’ house five years ago. Finally pushed out of the nest despite financial strife from the sheer stress of being packed unendingly into a box with the rest of my family with no escape, not allowed my daily reprieve of the college campus for the exploding pandemic. So in one mad dash of pickup trucks, I transitioned from a farmhouse style kitchen to a shoebox slapped with white paint and floored with sticky linoleum.
My parents’ kitchen wasn’t mine. I used it at odd hours — early, before my dad woke at 6. At 2 in the afternoon, after my mom had her lunch and returned to work. After dinner, well into the evening (but only if I could open the microwave before it beeped). The only thing I had time to cook properly was eggs, only spare the twenty minutes in the early morning without being invaded by people with more right to the space than myself.
But there, on the linoleum, with the white-painted walls entombing the hair of former residents and slapped sloppily over the outlets, I was in my kitchen. At first, I treated it as a space not my own. In and out, instant oatmeal, quickly scrambled eggs, some instant ramen. But gradually, I relaxed. I gathered kitchen supplies — spatulas, saucepans, cast iron — and that Christmas my partner’s father gave us an Instant Pot.
It did everything. Saute, steam, pressure cook, slow cook. For the first time I had a real tool, something to make some of the beautiful soups and stews I was missing from my mother’s kitchen. I made rice at first, then started digging up recipes for curry, for potato leek soup, for beef stew. And then, a year or two down the line, I stumbled on something all my own.
In a fit of mad genius, I occupied the kitchen for four straight hours. Seasoning, marinating, trimming chicken thighs. Preparing a broth of ginger and garlic, chopping carrots, kneading dough, browning and braising meat until finally everything went into the pot with a whole can of ale — some local microbrew I can’t remember. An hour later, the lid came off and I poured myself a bowl of the best drunken chicken and dumpling soup I had ever had. A magnum opus, rich and warm, full of love and madness.
I wrote down the recipe immediately, preserving it so I’d never forget.
And would you believe that I lost the damn notebook?
from the pen of icarus blake 
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