Not so easy office

I am writing this on Easy Simple Word. Easy Office must be the kitchen sink version of office suites. There are so many different programs in it that it is some time hard to find the right one behind the Start button. I have been using it for a couple of weeks but have hardly touched a third of the offerings. They all seems to work well, taking even less to get used to than Open Office. Most often one asks what else can an office suite do. In this case, however, one is tempted to ask what should Easy Office not do. They should really do some streamlining on it.
http://www.e-press.com/

 

Cooking and eating

I don't know when my love for eating was overtaken by my love for cooking. When was it that I changed from cooking to eat to eating to cook? It just came gradually, unperceivably slowly. I am frequently asked why I like to cook, as if it is something exceptional. One day recently, I answered, as I had numerous times before, that because I liked to eat well. Suddenly I felt like a liar. I realized that, because I usually ate my creations so quickly, it was more a test and duty than savoring. I no longer cook so that I can have good food to eat. I must at that point admit that I no longer cook to eat but eat to cook! There is a bit of sadness in that realization, as if some innocent pleasure has left me forever.

Somehow, my relationship with food has changed from consumption to performance and cooking has become an end in itself. Can I even call myself a gourmand anymore? When the preparation of food is more important than eating the food, it is difficult to pretend to be a gourmand! Fortunately, this is only true when I am cooking. I can still be a dedicated gourmand when it comes to someone else's food, may it be in a restaurant or a friend's dining room. This fact gives me a great deal of relief, like paradise re-found.

Why then can't I enjoy my own food as much as I enjoy others? Is it true that when you are cooking you sort of lose interest in eating? Or, is it because cooking and eating are two related but different roles, too difficult to switch so quickly? My thinking leans toward the latter. Case in point is making Gravlox. There are few things I enjoy making and eating as well as Gravlox in the middle of the summer when I can get those big fat fresh Fraser sockeye salmon from the fishing boat here in Vancouver. It isn't a complicated process but require some good skills in butchering the large fish. There is great pleasure of accomplishment for an amateur to cleanly dissect something so beautiful. The care required to slice perfectly along those soft bones and to pull out the line of pin bones on the fillet display a certain elegance. Then, the mixing and applying of the salt, sugar, pepper, dill and whatever else create an artistic kind of chemistry. Finally, the curing process is nothing but nature doing its work, without my involvement, except for a couple of turnings. It is this curing time that return me to being the eater from being the cook. In relation to the fish, I have time and other activities to extract myself from the role of the cook. When I return to that transformed piece of salmon, I am only the eater with the memory of the cook far back in my mind. The tasting and enjoyment is now pure. It is not the moment of truth, nor a duty to my own hard work; but a simple gourmand indulgence with the added pleasure of having it exactly the way I like it.

Maybe this is the alienation of production in its purist. We take on different roles when we produce and when we consume. When we produce, our enjoyment is fixed in the completion, and thus alienated from the actual purpose of the product, consumption. Similarly, when we consume, we actualize the full potential of the product, good or bad, but are alienated from its material history. The source of this alienation is not a material thing but an ideological thing. It involves a shifting of relations, an adjustment of subjectivity. In other words, it is a matter of re-positioning of oneself. A cook doesn't enjoy his own food quite as much as others because he is not supposed to, in an ideological kind of way.

Dinner (non)theatre

A meal is successful when the food becomes unimportant. Of course, there has to be food through the meal or it is not a meal at all. The food must also be at least palatable, since if no one is eating, it is not a meal either. However, if the food is the most important thing, it would just be feeding and not a meal. It is a common mistake to think that the food is the most important ingredient of a meal.

I have had horrible meals with exceptionally good food. You can certainly have a bad meal with the finest of ingredient executed with the most expert of hands. I must admit I have served as many such meals as I have received. Once I served a great rack of lamb to my cousin and his family forgetting that they do not like lamb at all. What I did not know then was precisely that the food is not that important. I started apologizing through the evening, feeling shameful and uptight. My cousin and his wife were nothing but gracious and understanding. He even ate some of the lamb cheerfully. It was not the lamb that ruined the meal but my insistence on the perfection of the food that I served. In other words, it was my ego that ruined it for me and to a leaser extent to them. Because they paid little attention to the food, they were able to have an enjoyable time. They saved the evening, not through bravery or tolerance (of both they had plenty), but by seeing what is unimportant as unimportant.

There are many dining establishments, particularly those rated restaurants on both side of the Atlantic, where food and its service are “celebrated.” “Food is theatre” has become the motto of any new “haute” restaurant. It is an excellent trend, after all for the outrageous amount we shell out for a meal these days, there better be something other than the bill that is theatrical. Give food some gravitas and exotic names and we can enjoy even food that usually abhors us. All these are great in restaurants, like Shakespearian language in the Old Vic. Indeed we go to fine restaurants like we go to theatres, to be entertained. We are not necessarily there for a good meal, we are there to experience culture. The hypocrisy of these restaurants shows when they tell us “it is all about the food.” They are not all about the food as Shakespearian theatre today is not all about Shakespeare. They are both about our internal exotic: experience of culture.

The problem that ruins our good meals occurs when we swallow the “all about food as theatre” contradiction and try to apply it to our own cooking and eating. Trying to understand the enjoyment of food in a fine restaurant is like trying to understand Shakespeare in the Old Vic. In the Old Vic, half of the time we do not even understand what words are being uttered; even when we do, their usage and delivery are so alien to us that we can only experience it as the sublime, which, incidentally, has only remote relationship with Shakespeare. It is the same with restaurants. We are so aliened from the production of it that we can only see it as an “art.” If we carry this alienation home, we end up with some seriously unenjoyable meal. One should not speak in Shakespearian or cook haute cuisine at home and not expect ridicule and unpleasantness. These days we watch too much Foodtv, and we are conditioned to learn only from restaurant cooks. Why should we? Indeed how can we? Who want to live full time in a theatre? Who want to go to a party in a theatre with fixed seats all facing the same way? Good food is not theatre, and a good meal is certainly not theatre. Good food leads us towards a good meal, and then we just sit about the table and enjoy everything intimately. During a good meal, the food melt into everything else, become part of the pleasantness of it all. There is no theatre, no gravitas, no ego, just a meal, the most fundamental of human experience.

First thought

Well, this is my first entry on my first blog, we will see how it goes