Cooking With Others

Cooking with other people can be a hazardous experience. Especially in a small kitchen, there's only so much space... and I'm not just talking about counterspace. Cooking is a very kinetic activity, you're darting from one place to another: chopping, stirring pouring. The more people you throw in the more likely it is that people will be stepping on each other's toes – figuratively as well as literally. That said, it can be really fun to cook with others. One thing that helps is a division of labour. If you have one person chopping and another person throwing those chopped items into a pan you're not going to have a lot of collisions. There are also some tasks where its really helpful to have multiple people helping out with. When I was a cook at Science '44, there would usually be at least 3 cooks in the kitchen (it was, also, a pretty big kitchen). When we were breading chicken, it was great to set up an assembly line where each person could perform one of the steps (Yes, I was breading chicken. There were 150 people in the co-op and most of them weren't vegetarians).

One of the nice things about being back in Toronto was getting to cook with my parents. We went to a lot of restaurants (some of which I've blogged about, some of which I will blog about and some of which I forgot to take pictures at) but had some meals we made at home.

The 'rents had bought some pre-spiced tofu and we basically just stir-fried it with a bunch of vegetables. We were planning on making rice but we forgot to put it on so made rice noodles instead. I spent the next few days running around and living on power bars and hor d'oeuvres so it was nice to be able to have a home-made meal before that.