Location Taken: Ithaca Farmer’s Market, Ithaca, New York
Time Taken: August 2008
I had a bit of an odd encounter today while shopping at the grocery store.
I was standing there debating the merits of the five different varieties of canned green beans when a rather confused-looking woman approached me.
She wanted chickpeas to put in her salad and wasn’t sure if it was the Garbanzo Bean or the Pinto Bean can she should grab. So I straightened her out, with extra data about both bean types to make sure she was getting the type she really wanted. I’ve bought both beans before, though I prefer black beans in general.
And then she profusely thanked me, with multiple comments along the lines of “I really asked the right person!”
And I bumped into her again a few aisles later and she thanked me again with a few comments about how knowledgeable I was.
It made me feel both competent and highly self-conscious. I mean, is it really that unusual to know the different uses of the various canned beans they sell at the grocery stores? All you need is a bit of love of cooking.
Which, well, I suppose is pretty rare.
These days, there’s enough prepared foods available for people to buy that if you don’t want to learn how to cook, you don’t have to. All you need to know is how to operate a microwave and you’re set for life.
A life of boring, preservative-laden food, but still, set for life.
Maybe that’s why I picked up cooking as a hobby. I can taste the preservatives in food, so the pre-made meals tend to taste more than a little off to me. Plus my sense of taste is pretty far off of normal (I have no sense of smell, so it’s all taste buds for me), and most pre-made foods are under-seasoned for me.
So I cook. And I like cooking. And one of my, how to put it, sub-hobbies is trying new things in my cooking. Every so often I’ll just buy some baby artichokes or taro root or starfruit and just give it a whirl. Look up cooking instructions on the internet and play with it until I understand the merits and disadvantages of the item.
I really do recommend doing that, if you like cooking. Or even if you just like food. Try something new every so often, you might just like it enough to add it to your diet.
I just bought a new container of baby artichokes today, after all. I use them all the time right now.
