This is a question of infinite proportions. One might as well ask why there is any real need to do anything well. Why marinate, why julienne, why mix a Martini instead of just pouring vodka on rocks? Why spend countless years studying the intricate balance of soil ph for a backyard garden, when it’s just as easy to pop over to the local market.

The answer, friend, is the amazing taste; the taste of something that was produced with sweat and toil. Knowing that your backyard eight by eight plot of dirt just produced tomatoes, bell peppers, and jalapenos for a household salsa that only a very few close friends and family will, most likely, ever eat. Even then, only the cooking gardener will ever truly appreciate the hours of toiling a small plot of earth, watering and weeding on a daily basis, watching with silent awe at the magnificent bounty which yields at harvest; an undertaking which peaks with a bounty of friends and family basking under food and drink, with byproducts of laughter and love. This is what it means to cook well.

Cooking is an extension of one’s own creative ability, a soul consuming effort of time, thought, and dedication to a craft which yields its own rewards of sensation through a network of the human senses; a wondrous marvel of thought coupled with ingenuity and appetite. Cooking, and doing it well, is an art, pure and simple, whether it’s from a professional chef or just the household cook. Cooking is a labor of love.  

Food extracts the memories of time. Soaked in flavor and smell, it dances in the recess of the mind. Every time I eat a fresh jalapeno or habanera, I am catapulted back to fourteen, sitting in my friend’s garden, eating fresh peppers and drinking warm beer, egging one and another on to take one more bite of heat. It was from that same garden that my love for all Latin food sprang. Because it was this house that I would watch my friend’s mom work a full time job and still have the passion to prepare food from scratch. It was a house that was filled with love and food; both of which were always seated around the dinner table. Baked, stirred, and simmered inside her kitchen, supplied with ingredients from her garden, this mother poured heart into her food. Food that was as accepting and as warm as the household.

As I left that place behind with the progress of life, I kept one important soul changing piece of it with me. That was to try anything, to expand ones point of view is to expand the richness of one’s life, and food is a big part of that life and mantra. To do anything well is to fill a need of importance. To cook well is a way of expounding life into an encompassing act, one which engages all the senses, memories, and experiences of life.