Hearth and Home

I am struggling with this post.

I did a fair amount of bloggable cooking this weekend (bloggable by my own humble estimation, that is), but now that it comes to time to record my adventures for posterity I find I am having trouble with tone. I want to write about two new jam sessions and a fraught encounter with an heretofore unfamiliar brand of gluten-free rigatoni, but I feel that, on this occasion, the irreverence with which I usually approach such subjects is all wrong. Tonight I am not experiencing any of the emotions that typically accompany gluten-free experimentation. I do not feel humorous, indignant, belligerent, or even out-right annoyed. I feel neither triumphant jubilation nor disheartened defeat. Rather, I am feeling thoughtful and quiet and have an overwhelming wish to leave my preserving and pasta posts for another day.

I suppose this is because of what I was thinking about - and what was happening around me - while I worked in my kitchen on Saturday. As I stirred and tended my preserving pan, Sir was trying to find out news of friends and colleagues in Tokyo. How were they? Were they safe? Were they with their families? As accounts came in of unfolding events and Sir forwarded scraps of news from the next room where he sat glued to his laptop, it seemed banal - trivial, even - in the face of others' overwhelming hardship to be spending time attempting a new recipe (even a recipe for preserves as splendid as the praline milk jam to which I was devoting the better part of the day).

But what else was there to do? I am not so self-aggrandizing that I thought for one moment events in Japan had anything to do with me in a personal way. But Sir and I feel a deep connection to this proud and puzzling country. We were in Tokyo for both the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks (the Kid Squid was only tiny then), and felt the same anxiety over those events that all parents of small children do. We couldn't help but suppose what it must be like there now.

This latest catastrophe, of course, is whole orders of magnitude worse. Unimaginably worse. As Sir waited to hear from a friend who had left work to attempt the hour's train journey home to his small daughter (he arrived safely, eventually), we naturally discussed our times in Tokyo and how they had been among the happiest of our lives. We pictured (as far as our feeble imaginations would allow) what was happening to people we knew and considered, selfishly, how fortunate we were not to be there now. We thought about the dangers our friends were facing (and face still) and felt safe, tucked away in our very benign corner of the world. We were worried, of course: but it was the sort of worry that is characterized by great distance and a complete inability to do or contribute anything even remotely helpful.

Is it such a bad thing to tend to one's pots and pans at such times? I concluded that it is not. What celebrates more completely the security and comfort of being surrounded by family and those we love than cooking for them - especially when we are cooking (just as those who came before us cooked) things that take time and care and long hours of attention at the stove?

And I guess that is why I am not feeling choleric, or irascible, or even virtuous and self-satisfied - the way I usually do after a day or two spent in the kitchen.

I feel reflective and thankful.

And mournful - but hopeful, too - for a country that feels a little like home to me.