As anyone who has taken a quick look at me can tell you, I love good food.
I also love sharing it with others, whether it is taking someone to a favorite restaurant, picking a good pairing of fruit and cheese or cooking for friends and family.
This love of cooking means I often get volunteered to cook at gatherings and holidays.
There are good and bad sides to this and they’re intensely related.
Cooking alone in your own kitchen is a far cry from packing multiple people into a small space and setting them off on their own dishes or collaborating and expecting everybody to get done at the same time or not to constantly bump into each other when turning around or need to get into the same area at the same time.
Having just shared kitchens for Thanksgiving and Christmas, I can attest the task requires good communication, which is where the good comes in.
Some of my favorite bonding moments came in the midst of mild stress episodes as I coordinated the Thanksgiving meal and fell in line to help with Christmas dinner in a kitchen so fancy I was sure it would reject my dishes and alarms would sound.
There may have been incidents as Dad and I started the Great Gravy Retrieval Battle of 2024 or an accidental drop of a live ranch dip grenade that splattered all over the previously mentioned fancy kitchen. However, the act of cooking for and with others kept the phone scrolling to a minimum and resulted in quality time free from most of the everyday distractions that sour or stop communication.
The tasty meals were a good reward for all the work, but getting to work alongside family and friends is a reward in itself.
— Paul Gaudette is the Managing Editor of The Dublin Citizen.