Cooking
Cooking is a creative exercise, the product of which I can consume to gain its power. Cooking is an expression of love that I share with friends and family. Cooking is a sensory experience that engages touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing. Cooking is an laboratory experiment using reagents which are conveniently safe for human consumption. Cooking is a demonstration of chemistry: catalysis, thermodynamics, colligative properties, emulsification, free-radical chain reactions; and of neuroscience: classical conditioning, procedural and episodic memory, olfaction and gustation, multisensory integration, and emotional responses. Cooking nourishes me and gives me a measure of control over my physical, mental, and emotional health. I will cook until I die.
Ten hot sauces, rated 1-10 in piquancy by heatonist.com, experienced through chicken wings (or cauliflower).
I prepared the wings and cauliflower, credit to my friend Amanda for organizing the event.
I worked with my friend Amanda to host a fancy dinner for friends in her home. I'm pictured here preparing an amuse-bouche of spherified peach puree with black pepper.