Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

joy of cooking

I’ve just finished preparing a side dish for tonight’s dinner party at Rob and Shawn’s. The theme this time is “Italian/Mediterranean,” so I’ve put together a fattoush, a Mediterranean salad made with tomatoes, cucumbers, onion and fresh herbs. I’ve had it before, with chicken kabobs at the Olive Tree Cafe in NYC, and it’s very light and summery.

It’s also fantastically easy to make. Chop, chop, chop, mix and toss it in the fridge. My kind of dish.

I culled the recipe from Nigella Lawson’s cookbook Forever Summer. I’m a big fan of her shows, Forever Summer with Nigella and Nigella Bites on the Style Network. Between the conversational tone of her book and her chatty, confessional style on her television show, I could just “hear” her English lilt offer instructions as I chopped the tomatoes.

I think Nigella Lawson is just fabulous. Her shows are a joy to watch because she treats the viewer as a kind of confidant, and because she seems to be truly enjoying herself as she cooks. She’s very attractive, but not in a “model-thin stick-insect” kind of way. She looks like she eats — and thoroughly enjoys — the food that she prepares (which reminds me of the maxim “Never trust a skinny cook”).

Throw it all together, and you have what Salon writer Charles Taylor calls “food porn.” (“Food porn” - 04/18/03)

For sensualists who, in food and in everything else, prize pleasure in life, Lawson is our superhero — gorgeous, sexy, professional, supremely confident and licensed to kill the evil — blandness, sensual deprivation, vegetarianism — that threatens the good things in life.

In the preface to her book How to Eat, Lawson writes, “In writing this book, I wanted to make food and my slavering passion for it the starting point; for me it was the starting point. I have nothing to declare but my greed.” If Lawson had written nothing but that last sentence, she would have won my heart. It’s her declaration of ethics, a pledge of allegiance to the pleasure principle, which is the surest and deepest way there is of responding to the Holy Trinity — food, sex, and art (not necessarily in that order) — and a stand against the truest Original Sin: guilt.