The Kitchen Game

A year ago, I baked a pie. It was Pi Day, and I wanted to enter into the spirit of the occasion. I had never baked a pie before and I didn’t know what I was doing. But one of my roommates had made a mouth-wateringly delicious savory spinach and gruyere pie on previous occasions, every time with the perfect crust: flakey, but not dry, chewy, but crisp. So I asked if I could have the recipe and use some apple butter her dad had made as a filling. She said yes. I set out to follow the recipe and decided to challenge myself to make a lattice top. And it turned out great.

I took a photo and posted it to Facebook, wishing everyone a happy Pi Day. That was the first time I shared a “food adventure” with the wider world. The response was lovely. I got likes and loves and laughs and encouraging comments. I was—still am!—in the process of looking for a full-time job, which can feel soul-sucking at times. I decided I could use all the encouragement and community I could get, and so I kept posting my food adventures.

I had only started to cook for myself regularly a few months previously and since then, cooking has become a refuge for me. My thoughts may be whirling around a bumpy job interview I’ve just had, or I might be snagged on anxiety about my future, but an hour spent in the kitchen always leaves me feeling more centered. As I’ve thought about the ways my cooking practice feeds me, I’ve come to think of the time I spend in the kitchen as time spent playing a game.

When I cook, I play. When we were children, the whole world was our playspace. But as adults, we create our playspaces, more or less apart from the rest of the world. Sometimes these are physical spaces—a stadium, a court, an arcade—and sometimes we construct these spaces using rules, strategies, techniques, lore.

In a literal sense, the kitchen is my playspace. A dungeon master has their tabletop; I have my stovetop. A tennis player wields their racket, and I wield my cast iron. As a chess grandmaster fingers their pieces, plotting their next move, I squat down in front of the open fridge and ponder what ingredient will bring balance to the stew simmering on the stove.

In a figurative sense, it’s the rules, strategies and techniques that help me cook that form my playspace. Cooking begins for me with the desire make something delicious and the creative impulse to try something new and challenge myself. But it's navigating all the things I have to bear in mind through the cooking process that makes it a game. Take salting, for example. I know that a certain amount of salt won’t make my food taste salty; it’ll just bring out the flavor. I know that no amount of salt at the end of the process will make up for not salting throughout. I know that, in addition to adding flavor, salt will make onions or mushrooms release water, which could help caramelization happen more quickly, or impede browning and crisping. These considerations don’t get in the way of the creative, spontaneous process of figuring out how a meal will come together. Just the opposite: they provide a structure for my mind to climb towards a solution.

A year after sharing my first cooking adventure, I've decided to tell stories about my adventures here, on this blog. Although I’ll always tell you how I make the food I tell stories about, this isn’t a recipe blog. Instead, what I’m looking to do is share the sense of play, challenge, fun, and adventure I feel when I cook, and the things I figure out along the way. In other words, this blog is about how I play as I cook, how I play the kitchen game.