everything is gravy

I started thinking about habit and tradition and the relationship between the two this evening while I was making dinner. I was cooking a meal I cook fairly often (pan-seared steak with roasted garlic, mashed potatoes, and mushroom gravy) and thinking about how half of my friends are better cooks than I will ever be and the other half are people who are very intimidated by the mere notion of making gravy in and of itself.

It reminded me of a new holiday tradition my family has started, because the old ones died away as the “kids” in the family grew older and we lost extended family members to death or estrangement (if you’re reading this and you have people in your family who are assholes: Guess what? You can just stop talking to them! It’s awesome.) A few years ago, my now-25 year old nephew decided he wanted to start cooking as a family at least one night during Christmas break. The rest of us embraced this easily, even as he picked challenging-for-beginners recipes (homemade ramen! biscuits from scratch!) because we are all enthusiastic about food and share a general “fuck it, let’s give it a shot” attitude.

We quickly learned that our attitudes were not his attitudes, and as we suffered through the absolutely tedious (but successful) process of making pasta and waiting for dough to rise (unsuccessful, and we don’t know why), we remembered yet again that just because someone is related to you, it doesn’t mean that they are like you. Connor took each wrong step as a sign of failure, and each time something didn’t go right, it was a sign to him that cooking was a difficult thing to do, and those tiny failures built up in his mind and became roadblocks to trying any further.

Fast forward to this year over Christmas break with no one in the kitchen but me and my nephew as he looked at me very dubiously while I ushered us through a recipe in the manner I always do (half-heartedly, as a guide, doing what I want in between steps.) He held a head of broccoli in his hand and asked me earnestly how he was meant to chop it. I looked at him blankly. “You just…chop it, dude.”

And then I saw the look on his face, and I dialed myself back, and I explained to him the relative size at which one should chop broccoli, and we carried on with me giving him very specific instructions when asked and leaving him alone when not. And we made a stir fry that the entire family said was extremely delicious, and he became slightly more confident in his abilities as a result.

Habit is everything when it comes to being confident in cooking, and those of us who cook regularly take it for granted. While I was making gravy tonight, I took for granted the fact that I co-opted a New York Times recipe a long time ago and have made it so many times I don’t have any need to reference said recipe. I took for granted that I don’t need to look up recipes for how to mash potatoes or roast garlic or sear a steak or saute greens, because I just know how to do these things. They are simple skills that I once looked up, for certain, but that I have now done a million times. They are habit. And when I do them with certain people - at Thanksgiving, making gravy for my friends, for example - those habits become tradition.

I made a handful of New Year’s resolutions this year because I am a person who likes to have things to focus on, who thrives on small and specific goals, and who wants to wake up next year a better person than I was the previous one. Most of those goals are targeted and tangible: Be a more supportive and present friend, buy more records, read more books, finish writing the romance novel I started writing when I was in Provincetown last summer. But a surprising - to me - amount of those goals are health and cooking related: Suddenly, I don’t want to take for granted the fact that I can make myself dinners anymore. I want to cook more from the huge stack of cookbooks in my living room, I want to learn to make more-than-passable focaccia, I want to make my own cheese from scratch because it is deeply satisfying to do so. I want to pickle more vegetables. I want to feed my loved ones more often. I want to move my body more, and I want to be stronger, and I want to use that strength to pour even more energy into all of the above.

After the last few years of uncertainty and feelings of doom, these goals feel to me like a clear signal: Stop just trying to stay alive and start being very intentional about living again. It’s a welcome feeling, and it’s one that is starting to infuse my reading and my writing and my meals and my thoughts in a way that I really didn’t know I was missing until now. The world is about to fucking burn, I have thought for some time as it crumbles around me, what more can you ask of me?

The world is already fucking burning, I think now, I can’t wait another second to live the way I want to live.

Anyway, here is the recipe for the greatest mushroom gravy on this planet!