Cooking is once again available to me.

Now Playing; Paula Cole

What to do on such a dreary day?? Why, bake cookies of course! I’m not quite brave enough to try making them from scratch so I’m still getting my feet wet by using Betty Crocker mix. To the more accomplished bakers out there I am sure this is pure sacrilege but cut me some slack, I’m new to this domesticity thing... What I DO have is a fantastic hand mixer (another housewarming gift) which has opened my eyes to all sorts of new cooking possibilities-cookies being the most obvious. Mind you, I do not have an apron on but I still feel pretty June Cleaver-esque just by wielding a mixer and some parchment paper!

Cooking is yet another seemingly mundane activity that I am only now beginning to appreciate since moving to Apartment Awesome. It’s not like I've NEVER tried it before-I took Home Ec in 7th grade-but this is the first time in 7 or 8 years that I've had my own kitchen! In Budd Lake I had a great makeshift kitchen with a double hotplate, microwave, and mostly dusty George Foreman grill. I had recently purchased a tabletop oven but it wasn’t the same. Of course there was a full kitchen upstairs in my mom’s part of the house but I could no longer use it because I couldn’t climb those pesky stairs (I crawled up and down the stairs for a while until my legs stopped working altogether.) It’s difficult to convey just how wonderful it is to now have a ‘grown-up’ oven and four working burners that don’t pose a substantial fire risk. I adore having a sink to soak my fun kitchen tools and a dishwasher to load! Before, armed with just a tiny pedestal sink to wash my dishes in, I usually did my best to avoid using large pots or pans (and had to hover over the bathtub to wash them when I did.) Unfortunately this often translated to meals that required a minimum of effort-often just the microwave. And the times I did feel up to cooking an actual meal it was always exhaustive let alone have the energy to clean everything up in my tiny sink.

Don’t get me wrong-it’s not like I’ve never cooked before- I made a mean eggplant parmesan once upon a time! But that was when I was ambulatory and living independently. My MS made it impossible to have that kitchen anymore and I really did make the best of my kitchen setup in Budd Lake. But it was a shadow of what I could do before and I felt resigned to that new normal of ‘good enough.’ And there wasn’t anything wrong with that, really, I was able to make do and I certainly wasn’t destitute but my new kitchen has emboldened me to look at cookbooks again. I now find myself pondering buying a wok or a dumpling press. That may seem like an odd thing to get giddy about but it’s just another facet of life that you don’t truly appreciate until it’s gone. So bring on the recipes because I’m just starting to spread my domestic wings.