Cooking while broken

There was a time about 10 years ago when I got excited about cooking -- I read a Mark Bittman book about why it's good to cook at home, and I was briefly converted. (A similar surge of interested happened a few years earlier when I read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma.")

But it didn't take.

I try to practice my egalitarian preaching, though I probably fall short. My wife likes to cook -- or at least, she seems to, and she's very creative at it -- but I still try to cook a couple of nights a week. Usuallly it's something simple -- spaghetti, maybe, or chili. Maybe veggies thrown into a pan with a premade simmer sauce.

I sometimes miss doing more ambitious things, though. Today, while it's snowing outside, I tackled a recipe for slow-cooker cassoulet. Usually the slow-cooker works for my lazy man style of cooking -- just throw in stuff and turn the machine on. The cassoulet required a bit of prep, however: Chopping, browning, mixing.

You know, cooking stuff.

But I was reminded why I tend to shy away from this in the first place: My body remains broken from my surgeries (also about a decade ago at this point), and doing the physical job of cooking is ... exhausting. I solved the problem today by sitting for a lot of the prep. But my back still hurt quite a bit when it was all over.

I'm not asking for sympathy here. And I'm hesitant to use a word like "disabled." But ... I have less ability than I did. Some of that may be because I'm older, but a lot of it is is being broken. I can't -- and won't, ever again -- be able to do some things I used to do. And the things I do, physically, take a lot more out of me.

Like cooking.

Today, I found a solution. I need to keep looking for those kinds of solutions. I think I've let my brokeness keep me from living a full life over the years. But I only have this life. I don't want to spend it just staring at a screen.