Living to Eat

Image from here

I always fail to understand those people who cite food and cooking as a hobby. Philately is a hobby. Lapidary is a hobby. Blogging and scrapbooking are hobbies - well until they become legitimate home businesses they're hobbies. Food is not a hobby - food is what keeps you alive.

A hobby is an activity or interest that is undertaken for pleasure or relaxation during your spare time. Which is why stamp collecting is a hobby. If you don't put your stamps into their album this week then it's probably not the end of the world. Similarly knitting - if you no longer have time to knit then you may feel guilty at the half finished dove grey mohair cardigan that sits accusingly in the hall cupboard, remembering the exorbitant cost of the yarn, but your store bought jacket will warm you just as well, and in my case a darn sight more fashionably to boot.

If cooking is a hobby, then I wonder what happens when people no longer have time to cook. Do they resort to take-away toast and Vegemite with a coffee chaser at the local cafe, or do their families merely fade away becoming shadows of their former robust selves? Perhaps they keep cooking, but their repertoire of dishes never changes, and dinner at the Joneses in the noughties is a time capsule of dinner at the Joneses in the 70s - prawn cocktail, roast chicken with greying beans and potatoes followed by Black Forest Gateau, cheese and Jatz bikkies and Afterdinner mints with Nescafe. Mmmmmm Mmm!

Now I understand that for some people cooking is not a pleasure but an incessant, never-ending chore, but that does not give you the freedom to stop doing it. You may not live to eat; but like it or not, you and your family do need to eat to live. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.

So given that you'll be cooking for a very long time to come, why not get excited about food? You know, even if you don't like cooking all that much, it can actually be fun. You just need to put it back in its proper place as a necessity and remove it from its wrong placement as a hobby, and something you can just give up for Lent.

I'm much too busy to have a hobby except blogging, which for me is more a necessary release from the worries of raising small people and caring for home and husband and other important day-to-day concerns than a hobby anyhow, but I will admit to wasting an awful lots of valuable time in and around the preparation of food.

For me food time wasting includes the serious study of cookery books. For a girl who tells herself and others that she has no time for scrapbooking, genealogy and other niceties of life, I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time that I profess not to have reading about food. Ethnic recipe books exert their strongest grip upon me, which in turn leads to more food time wasting in the aisles of Japanese Supermarkets, Middle-Eastern pastry shops and Asian markets as I learn more about new and deliciously exciting ingredients and culinary techniques.

The best time to indulge a cookery book binge is the summer holidays - long days of nothing to do. The book publishers know this of course, and all the best cookery books are released in November just in time for stuffing into the stocking of a loved one on Christmas Eve.

My family know me very well too. They also know the importance of food and cooking as a necessity, and we indulge each other equally. This year my gifts included David Thompson's Thai Street Food and Luke Nguyen's The Songs of Sapa. My brother received Lulu Grimes' The Cook's Book of Everything, my sister-in-law Donna Hay's Seasons. We all received subscriptions to her eponymously named cooking magazine.There were not one, not two, but three KitchenAid Mixers courtesy of my incredibly generous parents - one for each couple. There were the ingredients for sushi making for my mother, and herb keepers for everyone.

For my family, clearly, food is more than a necessity. I could even go as far as to admit that for us it's an...um..er...hobby! In fact, I cannot lie to myself any longer. I do have time for collecting stamps, pigs and coins. I can scrapbook. I might even have time to knit. You know, I really do have a mohair cardy lying half finished in the hall cupboard. I just need to put it back as priority and get on with it. Or maybe not...

Clearly I do have time for a hobby after all. It is just that with cooking we all get to eat the results, and a lovely crab wonton and barbeque pork soup tastes an awful lot better than mohair stuck between the teeth I can promise you. Perhaps on second thoughts I should embrace my new life as a girl with a hobby and let you get on with the quilting and sewing and felting and painting and all the other things that I have always told myself I don't have time for. After all, if I did all of that, then we'd be eating to live too, and I'd much rather live to eat.