Kitchen calling helps me cope

I’m a huge fan of cooking.

Food is so central to the American family — and there are so many delicious things to eat. It’s my mission in life to try every recipe I can get my hands on. I watch the Food Network religiously, scour websites for recipe ideas — I even downloaded a couple of phone apps to help me plan my grocery shopping.

Every weekend, I carefully select my culinary quests and make my list. I like to craft make-ahead meals for the entire week, so I need four to five dishes. Then I forge my plan of attack at the store to see how quickly I can get in and out (22 minutes is my current record).

I battle each weekend to carve out the time to prepare all these dishes and, with a 2-year-old, that isn’t very easy. At the end of these days, my feet ache from standing and my brow is sweaty from being over a stovetop for hours.

But the feeling it gives me is euphoric.

Nothing beats the complete satisfaction of making food for other people. The looks on their faces when they eat a perfect bite produce an amazing feeling for me as a cook. And I never feel more maternal than when I can make food for my son.

Cooking also gives me an escape from the stresses of life. When I’m focused on a recipe, I’m not worrying about work or the bills or the laundry. All I can see is the onion I’m chopping or the sauce I’m stirring.

It helps me cope with setbacks as well. After more than a year of trying to get pregnant, my optimism that it will ever happen is beginning to falter. The short story is that my ovaries are not releasing those precious eggs in order to get the process started. The long question is whether doctors will be able to overcome this challenge.

It’s frustrating and defeating, but I am a working professional, a wife and a mom so, like countless other women in my position, I simply don’t have time to have the emotional breakdown I’m entitled to.

So I find myself in my kitchen — just me and the pans mixing it up. We travel to places all over the world: China, Mexico, Italy, India, even Spain. When I’m on a culinary journey, the only eggs I think about are the ones in my frying pan and the only crying is when I labor over chopping onions a little too long.

Sometimes my preparations are brilliant, sometimes they’re barely tolerable, but the more important thing is that cooking helps me keep my sanity.

— Sarah Leach is editor of The Holland Sentinel. Contact her at (616) 546-4278 or sarah.leach@hollandsentinel.com.