Sunday Thoughts
Creative drought.
A more aesthetic looking kebab plate by @kittycoles
I write from my bed on this sun soaked Sunday. It is self prescribed. It is Ramadan, a month for turning to inwards reflection, of hungry, charity, community and spiritual nurturing. It is usually my favourite time of the year. It is also a time where I allow my self rest. A pause. Yet this year there is to much on life’s to do list; my research is due, I’m launching a new business and I’m moving into a different grown-up phase of life. So naturally I don’t have time to slow down. It is exactly the time that a creative drought shows up ( it always does) requiring me to slow down to take it all in before the next phase. So I give myself a day in bed, with Mad Men, trying to soothe the guilt of resting on a Sunday and reflecting on a week of food (what else?) and how it makes us feel, both the process of cooking and eating.
Anyone who has fasted or experienced hunger will tell you that the sense of carvings and creativity associated with food is heightened. Ever get off a long haul flight and feel the intensity of craving for a particular meal associated with a place, mine is Joe’s Pizza in the West Village NYC or the buttery chewy yet flakey croissant after a morning Eurostar to Paris or maybe arriving to a Greek Island and anticipating that first salad, a bowl full of ripest tomatoes, freshest cucumbers, mild onions and the creamiest feta. A welcome meal, signalling your tastebuds arrival to a new place. Well that's what a day of fasting feels like, everyday for an entire month but its is a bit of a cerebral experience (you aren’t going anywhere physically). This Ramadan however, mine is experiencing a bit of a drought.
This first week of Ramadan, I tried to quench my creative dehydration with recreating a few different versions of things I had seen online and others that existed in my imagination. Yesterday, a vegetarian version of a meal that is common in many parts of the world, bread, meat filling, salad and some sauces. A taco or a burrito in Mexico, a Doner or a shawarma in Turkey or the Middle East, a kebab roll in Asia or a gyros in Greece. There is a version everywhere is Eurasian cuisine. It is one of my favourites on the go meals, in fact it may explain my adulthood affinity to wraps. It had been playing in my mind that I should create a kebab in a flat bread with some spicy sauce and salad for a few weeks. My imagination was creating all the right texture and flavour balances. When it came to execution it fell flat, literally, the kebab ( made from kidney beans and carrots) came undone as I cooked it in the pan. So I changed course and turned it into a bean patty, recruited an egg to its rescue. We got there in the end some 6 hours later because when you have only one meal in the day on a weekend, you can really overdo the obsession with its texture and taste. It turned out to taste like delicious concoctions from my fantasy ( but almost anything does after a day of fasting) but not much in the aesthetics department. It was a journey of discovery and the lessons here are that not every meal will translate on to the plate like it exists our imagination, that sometimes in the process you create something else emerges that wasn’t even part of the plan, in this case a roasted tomato, onion and chill sauce/dip thing ( will share its recipe soon) and that when it comes to food, how it makes you feel is just as important as everything else.
“Make a place available to the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer available to the eyes. ”