Cooking My Way Into The Story

Or how to chop and stir and pound your way back

I hit a snag in the book-in-progress last week. One innocent question from my editor revealed a giant hole in the story, and I stopped dead in my tracks. For two weeks, I’ve been spinning ideas around, trying this, trying that, finding no satisfaction in anything.

Now, don’t get worried. This happens all the time—something in the original basket of ideas doesn’t work or needs refinement or needs to be brought more to the front. It’s just part of the process and the book will (eventually) be fine.

But when I’m in the middle of it, it’s high dudgeon. I huff and sulk and vigorously clean things that haven’t had enough attention. I am irritable, circling the book and poking it now and then to see what it might cough up, as if it’s the job of the book to write itself. I drag out all my tools, the favorite plotting books¹ and charts I’ve concocted over the years. I pull out a yellow tablet and scribble possibilities. I cut photos out of magazines. Sometimes I build a collage, but that hasn’t been helpful the past few books.

Eventually, I retreated to the kitchen. Last weekend and into early this week, these are the things I cooked: bread from scratch, including the flour mixture I use as a substitute for wheat flour. I roasted cauliflower for a version of kung pao cauliflower from my new favorite cookbook², then roasted red peppers and shredded purple cabbage and baked tofu for Buddha bowls, topped with the peanut sauce I’ve finally mastered. I roasted grapes and then whipped goat cheese and yogurt to serve with them. When the bread started getting stale, I made mustard croutons to top a thick potato leek soup to warm us on a day of endless squalls. Finally, I made a lemony mustardy pasta dish with the last of the roasted cauliflower, loosely based in another recipe from my new favorite cookbook.

A lot of chopping, peeling, saucing, roasting. A lot of pans and bowls and utensils. I welcomed all of it, so I didn’t have to think about the plot thing that was Not Working and Would Probably Never Work, Ever, Thus Ending My 35-year Career.

I also took long walks, when I could between rain storms, and listened to podcasts. One of my favorites is Modern Love, and Samin Nosrat read one of the most beautiful ML essays ever, “You May Want to Marry My Husband.” Nosrat’s exuberant laugh, her vividness, made me want to watch her Netflix show, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, so I added that to my list of ways to avoid the book.

(If you haven’t, please take the time to watch this beautiful series. Of all the food television I’ve watched (a lot), it’s one of the very best.)

It just made me wanted to cook more. Cook everything.

And then, for no particular reason, I had a little glimmer of an idea. I left the cookbook on the counter, open to “Turkish Pepper Paste,”³ and came into my office to write. I opened up the structure files and filled in about twenty scenes, flowing one to the next in a way that seemed completely obvious once I saw them. I wrote all afternoon, and the next morning, and fleshed out the missing pieces and left a few for discovery later (a person wants some surprises, after all).

Last night, we ate frozen macaroni and cheese. The day before, it was scrambled eggs. But the book is flowing, and I’m nicer, and my beloved is a very laid-back soul who will eat scrambled eggs every night if I’m doing the cooking.

Of course, there will be more trouble before I’m done, more thorny things I can’t quite see, but when I’m back in the flow, it all seems manageable. I know I’ll figure out a fix, and if I can’t do it on my own, I have friends I can talk things over with, and an editor who is quite good at seeing things like missing pieces, thank goodness.

Why does cooking work? For one thing, it’s creative, full of color. I like knife cuts and the visuals of vegetables and the smell of spices. I love starting and finishing the process in an afternoon, producing a product in a day, rather than the year or better it takes to create a whole book. Cooking beautiful food is nurturing, a signal to the girls in the basement that I really am taking care of them and the body we all live in.

In the end, it’s really just letting go. Letting the brain fall into a relaxed mode, focused on something fairly straightforward so it can play with ideas in the background. Forcing an answer never works. Letting go often does.

Do you find cooking therapeutic? Have you cooked something new lately that you really loved? Let’s chat in the comments.