Cooking Creatively

Try as I might, I am unable to create an apple. It’s probably a good time to come completely clean rather than letting the truth come out one slow drip at a time. I can’t create a carrot either. Or a cow. Or a tree. What does it mean to create? What does it mean to be creative or to show creativity? While I can’t make any of those things out of thin air, what I can do is arrange them in certain ways. I can manipulate them with heat or cold. I can cut them. Combine them. I can control quantity and portion sizes. Granted, I can’t create an apple. But I can create an apple pie. That’s what it means to be creative in the kitchen.

Working with Melissa on our joint project, Trainee Hero: Creative Life is an opportunity to show how cooking and preparing food can be as fulfilling as any other creative project. Today, I’ll talk about how I see cooking as creative, how you can increase your opportunities for culinary creativity by boosting your cooking knowledge, and that creativity in cooking does not demand originality or imagination. When you cook, you create!

Cooking is Creative 

The more Melissa and I talked through our individual interests the more the similarities between what we do became clear. Her preferred medium is crocheting. Mine is cooking. She uses yarn. I use food. We both follow or create a pattern or recipe. We both go through the process of trial and error and build on previous projects to create new and exciting things. The only real difference is that while she might end up with a hat, I end up with a soup.

A big part of who Melissa and I are as individuals, part of what makes us the best versions of ourselves, comes from being creative. Working together we’ve been able to reserve time each day for each of us to do something that fulfills that creative need. But life happens and there are days when perhaps the only opportunity to make or create is in the kitchen. Taking advantage of that opportunity is a wonderful way to get a measure of creative fulfillment. It is also an opportunity to put something yummy in your face.

By no means do you want or need to feel pressured come up with a creative masterpiece every time you’re hungry. You’re tired. You have people to see and things to do. Luckily grocery stores, and then our cupboards, have countless items whose primary selling point is that they are “ready in under five minutes.” There are days when five minutes feels like too much work and I opt for the three minute ramen noodles. Having those options at our disposal is great. I don’t want to get bogged down in definitions, but suffice it to say that heating up a microwave meal or boiling some ramen noodles and adding a seasoning packet isn’t what I mean by cooking and is not what I mean by creative. Pre-packaged meals fill the belly but don’t do much for the soul. My goal is for Trainee Hero to help you feed both.

Knowledge Boosts Creativity

There are individuals fundamentally incapable of walking past a piano without playing Heart and Soul or Chopsticks. It’s a tell that the individual doesn’t know how to play the piano. Heart and Soul and Chopsticks are the beginning and end of their piano prowess. Asked to transpose the songs into a different key or play a piece of music set in front of them they are at a loss. They can play a song, not the piano. It’s an important distinction.

At Trainee Hero, hopefully you’ll find more than yummy recipes–more than the ability to play a song, so to speak. You’ll find principles applicable to cooking in general–to playing the piano. I want the time you spend at Trainee Hero to be worth the investment. Rather than offering anecdotes explaining my inspiration for a particular dish, you’ll find ways the experience of making that dish will benefit your cooking in the future.

Thumb through some recipes for roasted potatoes and you will find variations on the same basic principles. The primary difference between them is the way the potatoes are seasoned. Beyond that, they are fairly uniform. What that means to you is that if you can follow that one recipe you can take the general principle of roasting the potatoes and by simply changing the seasoning, you’ve created an entirely different dish. The week after next I will be writing about roasted potatoes and sharing information quite different than most of what you’ll find online. Subtle, simple changes to the process of roasting the potatoes will make your potatoes ones to write home about. Full disclosure, I kind of geek out about potatoes. They fascinate me.

Creating Doesn’t Require Originality

This idea took a while for me to internalize. Last Christmas I drew a couple pictures as a gift to Melissa. I looked at a drawing and I drew what I saw rather than drawing an image originating in my head. I kept pointing out to her that the drawings weren’t “original,” that I didn’t come up with them. Each time I tried to point that out to her she would stop me tell me “you made these.” Even though I didn’t design them they were still my creation. Being reminded of that, I began thinking about other activities in the same way.

Who is more creative, the musician who plays a song or the composer who writes it? The carpenter or the architect? The dancer or the choreographer? Here is a better question. Who cares? Each person is creating. When you step into the kitchen to cook the entire point is make something. To create something. Whether you choose to follow the recipe or if you use the recipe as a jumping off point, you are being creative. You get to look at your finished product knowing that you are responsible for making it. You prepared and arranged the ingredients in a way that transformed them from several disconnected, separate pieces into one coherent dish. How cool is that?

Don’t get hung up on “who thought of it.” Don’t get hung up on what you didn’t do. Creating is so much simpler than that. Did you make that? If the answer is yes then you’ve done something creative. That is something to be proud of.