What's Cooking?

I have always liked to cook, but in the last year or two it has become, hands down, my favorite hobby.  (I even rank it above watching tapes 4 and 5 of the BBC Pride and Prejudice over and over again, if you can believe it.)  One of my good friends from New York, pianist Kimball Gallagher, who is an excellent and dedicated cook himself, suggested to me what may be the big attraction of all those hours in the kitchen.  Cooking, he says, is the complete creative experience.  You decide what you want to make, create it, enjoy it until you're satisfied...and that's it.  You clean up, turn off the lights in the kitchen, and go do something else.  The more I think about it, the more I feel that it is, indeed, that notion of completion that compels me to cook.  In most parts of my life, the work is never done at the end of the day.  As a pianist, there are always improvements left to make and pieces left to learn.  As an academic, there is always my dissertation left to finish (which, incidentally, does exist in a complete draft now..but next comes the book version!), new scholarship out there to read, another conference or job to apply to.  While I'm sure that plenty of chefs are occupied with the idea of making progress, so far I have let cooking be one activity where I'm not particularly concerned with self-improvement.  When I set out to make something in the kitchen, it is to enjoy it in the moment and share it with friends and/or family.  If the souffle falls or the tart burns, I might get discouraged, but I start fresh the next day on a new task.  Most of the time, my culinary disasters aren't too outrageous anyway, and something enjoyable emerges.  If only I could finish practicing and revising each day with the same sense of satisfaction and contentment that I experience after a good home-cooked meal.