December 14, 2010

The Food Day section of today’s Oregonian featured some recipes that looked pretty mouth-watering to me. Maybe it was because I was hungry.

My son Sam, a junior in college, has shown an interest in cooking and we like to watch the Iron Chef show on the television when he is home. We have decided to do an “Iron Chef” meal at some point over the holiday season. We plan to identify several food items, write their names on a slip of paper, throw them in a paper bag and when it comes time to cook a meal we will draw a slip out and that one item must be included in every course of a five course meal. So far in the bag we have oranges, mustard, clams, walnuts and a few others I can’t remember. The other limitation is time. We must cook this meal in one hour. We have some time to think about this. For example, what if we draw ‘clams’? We must come up with five courses that include clams as an ingredient. Clams in a soup, clam fritters, pasta with a creamy clam sauce, clam dip for veggies and a dessert—using the clam shells as cups and filling them with ice-cream or fresh fruit. That’s five!

We’ll have to go through each of the ‘theme’ ingredients in this way so that when the hour comes we have a game plan. I view this as a kind of playing. Play is viewed in our culture as frivolous, a waste of time, and something we outgrow. Isn’t it ironic that we spend big bucks to watch a sporting event, theatre production, or a concert (essentially paying to watch other adults play!)

Cooking is about creation. It reminds me of the Creation account in Genesis 2. God forms man out of ‘red clay’ (adamah). He works with what is at hand. The ‘ingredient in the bag’ was clay. I don’t read this literally, i.e. man was formed from clay, but I do read it as saying something about God. He plays.