T is for Training
Tuning in
It was raining when I got on the train but as we wind into the yellow and green tones of Normandy countryside, the clouds are parting and the sun is beginning to shine. I don’t often take the early (06h36) train to head to my weekend of work in the Perche but now that we are fully and warmly embracing summer, the lighter mornings have made this mission a lot easier. Another discovery that has made this early start more palatable is the opening time of Pret A Manger at Montparnasse station. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, I really fucking love Pret and I’m not even (that) ashamed to admit it anymore. My 6am brain has been whirring with ideas for writing this morning, which is a welcome change after a few months of block, and this one felt apt as I drink my latte and eat my blueberry muffin.
The stability or constant of Pret is what I value most about its presence in my life. I know, that no matter where I go, whichever airport or train station or street corner (if I’m in London), my latte and whatever pastry I choose is going to taste exactly the same. This taste is certainly not perfect (read; not even very good), it is not a specialty coffee and there is something quite sickly industrial about the sweetness of this muffin but I knew that going in and it was exactly what I was craving. It is the same with McDonalds, a consistency so stable it feels familial. So, this muffin, whose crumbs are decorating my keyboard as I type, made me wonder about stability and if that is something that I am looking for.
My gut response would be yes, 1000%, tie me down and let me live out the rest of my days in the same apartment, with a stable job, a group of friends that doesn’t move, and for the whole nine years why not a husband and a dog. But, looking at the choices I’ve made over my adult sentient years, it seems I’m also a bit addicted to the chaos of the unknown. I recently made a big and quite horrid decision to turn down a job opportunity that would have been a career move for the next five (or maybe more) years and whilst originally the prospect of being fixed to one restaurant felt comforting, the more I sat with it, the less prepared I felt to give up the freedom of movement that I currently possess. The question of “but what now?” has been thrown at me a few times in the past weeks and all I can really say is eek who knows but that’s ok, more than ok even.
I read something this morning that said “the Universe will make you so uncomfortable when you aren’t on the right path. It will make you so uncomfortable so that you start moving differently and towards where you’re meant to be going. Don’t resist it.” With hindsight, the Universe had been telling me that I was not on the right track and I hadn’t been listening. It took the Universe sending a big taxi to physically knock me off my bike for me to realise that there was something that wasn’t right. My philosophical rudder of believing that everything happens for a reason is relatively simple to stand by, what is not always as evident is working out what that reason is. It is even more difficult to explain that reasoning to other people. To use an instinct or a gut feeling as a big decision maker feels slightly unstable and, even for me, a bit loony, but a culmination of past lived experiences make up these strong premonitions and they shouldn’t be ignored. Pushing aside instinctual feelings is akin to obliterating everything that you’ve done up until now and all you’ve learnt in favour of “maybe it’ll be different this time.”
It is more often than not not different this time and instinct makes up who we are. We speak of instinctive cooking, people having an innate sense of taste and being able to cook extremely well with this intuition. I certainly grant this whilst also acknowledging the training and rote learning of many high class chefs, but I think there is a hereditary instinct that is hard to shake. While deciding what to eat for dinner tonight, I had a hunkering for some beef, my iron deficiency shouting very loudly, and so I settled on a bolognese. I arrive at Biocoop in Nogent-Le-Rotrou and find myself reaching for courgettes, mushrooms, peppers. All of the culinary school, years of working in restaurants, and a general internalised snobbery about Italian food, doesn’t stop my instinct of cooking my Mum’s “bolognese” and calling it by its name. It is what arrives first in my head when I picture a bolognese, a large red casserole pot filled with roasted vegetables and seasoned with ketchup. The first meal of the week being a spag bol, likely followed by jacket potatoes and that same bol, and finishing the week with a lasagne. A core memory that has engrained itself into my cooking repertoire and will remain firmly there, even if they won’t let me live in Italy having admitted this. Grazie mamma!
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