Tasting Lab Makeup Week Four

In week four and five I was missing in action. My anxiety was rather volatile and acting up, and I was unable to be present for the entire class period for the first two weeks. If I had been sustaining my emotion through more interaction with others I feel like I could have been able to enjoy the remainder of Tuesday’s class, but I wasn’t, and I needed to leave and reflect. In posting a personal cooking lab I don’t mean to take away from the work that Alana and Annie did to prepare the pudding in week four and the work that went into the meal in week five by Spencer, Sjoukje, and others that helped. I have been struggling to experiment and create food recipes while having to coordinate borrowing fridge space from another person since I do not have one available to me in the dorms (vomit, greased stains, dead moths, and unmentionable stench deterred me from paying to borrow one from the school – no wonder RAD services weren’t inclined to clean them early in the quarter). Since then I traveled home to experiment with recipes with cold kept items and realized how simple cooking is when the recipes are pre-purchased and there is a reliably accessible space and resources. After being exposed to that, I hope to experiment when back at Evergreen with limited resources, and being able to make a meal that isn’t one dimensional with creativity as Vertemae Smart-Grosvenor has shown in her travels in Paris. Since then I have been incredibly excited to cook and have already found successful trade in ingredients and enjoyable shared experiences in the Sun Kitchen on campus. Upon visiting home to recharge and reconnect with my sense of self, I was able to use a real kitchen and created a Cinco De Mayo day meal with my brother. We started with a large bowl, parchment paper, a cutting board, a measuring cup, and an open stove top. We whisked enough hot water melted butter and corn masa together to dough up some homemade tortillas. We folded over the parchment paper and pressed out tortillas like a circus juggler (flipping tortillas on stove time) doing a cylinder and board act, except with an inflatable cylinder with a leak, until we were hunched over the cutting board with flattened circles ready to flop onto a burner. From there we ate some of gifted parsley from our neighbors with beans (unfortunately no sweet potatoes) and other store bought fixins to decorate our tacos with.