Fresh out the kitchen

Written by Kirsten Schnackenberg
Thursday, 03 December 2009 01:00

When I mentioned to a friend that I would be cooking Thanksgiving dinner for my family this year, she looked at me as if I had just flown in from Mars with five extra heads in tow. Barring that rather unlikely possibility, in which case I could have forgiven her shocked stare, I was rather surprised by her reaction. For my friend, the idea of a fellow teenager taking on such a task was simply inconceivable. How did I know how to execute the meal? Or, more importantly, why would I want to?

What my unsuspecting friend did not know, however, was that I am part of a family who expects and encourages me to think of cooking as a joyful and rewarding pursuit; the notion of a teenager being responsible for Thanksgiving is not foreign in the least to me. While other kids read Nancy Drew and The Boxcar Children, I pored over culinary magazines from Gourmet to Taste of Home, cutting out countless recipes and filling notebooks with recipes I hoped to one day use. When my friends were hooked on Lizzie McGuire, I faithfully tuned into the Food Network, worshipping the confident chefs on the screen who executed complicated recipes and tasks with ease.

While most of the birthday parties I was invited to were sleepovers, karaoke nights or movies, for several years my close friends and I traveled up to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., to spend a day in a cooking class with professional chefs and culinary students. I have been to local farmers’ markets in search of ingredients, countless cooking demonstrations by the chefs of New York City restaurants, and my cookbook collection would rival most experienced adult chefs. Whenever I travel, I often base my plans around the culinary offerings of the region I happen to be in. Whether it is visiting hydroponic farm to learn how plants can grow without soil, or discovering how to cook the fish native to a tropical island, my passion for cooking has many times defined my destination. Thus, the very art of cooking has gradually become a source of comfort and enjoyment for me, rather than a cause for the fright and anxiety it arouses in many my age.

In a culture where food is often demoted to fuel, a necessary function to power the body for the next task, cooking is most certainly a less admired and, ultimately, a less vital ability than it once used to be. Faced with the plethora of restaurants, take-out options and fast food places of the modern age, traditional cooks have had, in many ways, the luxury of resorting to other ways of feeding themselves and their families. That said, there is something special, meaningful and indescribable about the often laborious, lengthy nature of creating a meal from scratch, from shopping for ingredients and choosing recipes to finally placing the food proudly on the table. Through such a process, food is transformed from fuel into pleasure, from necessity into privilege. Such a transformation provides an irresistible reason to spend time in the kitchen this holiday season.

Kirsten Schnackenberg of Greenwich is a junior at Greenwich Academy.