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I celebrated 2024 with my best friend Hanna and her family in their grandmother's family home in Mallorca. Every night, as the sun set, the 10 of us gathered together in the kitchen, each assigned a cutting board, a knife of varying sizes, and the ingredients that fit such knife, and chopped away, utilising the many nimble hands and passionate tastebuds to collaborate and curate something delicious, with a taste of every cook's input and ideas. Along the wall of the kitchen, the wall was plastered in paper that had been pinned to the wall. Recipes, calendar notes from years before, receipts, train tickets, drawings of the family behind spanish blue skies and yellow suns from Hanna and her sisters' childhood. Amid the papers' I noticed a random list of ingredients, and I could not piece together what this list could possibly cook up! Stephani, Hanna's mother and an incredible cook, told me about a game that she and the family would play together, called 'Creative Cooking'. It goes a little like so: With a collective trip to the store and a handful of tote bags, all cooks roam around the shop together and purchase an array of ingredients. Portion sizes of each batch remain small, but enough to serve each dinner party member a tasting menu style taste of each dish, depending on how many contribute to the dinner. A 10 person dinner party is a 10 serving feast, a 'chaos menu'. With an array of meats, vegetables, fruits and such, from savory to sweet to sour, the produce is set in a pile on the table. With a bowl full of participants, a name is drawn from the bowl and she gets to pick an ingredient from the pile. this circulates until all ingredients have vanished from the table. There, starting with whoever would like to create the first course, enters the kitchen (with the help of the other hungry dinner members) and a dish is created using those ingredients as the key flavours. After every dish is made, it is enjoyed collectively around the table, and the next chef begins. Taking you deep into the evening, your evening is encapsulated by erupting laughter, adrenaline, sizzling pans, steam and full bellies, loving people, deep into the night. I owe Hanna's family the reminder of cooking as a 'family'. Contribution, conversation and collaboration makes food feel like more than a fundamental step in our daily routines. Cooking alone can be self-love, cooking for others can be fulfilling (and perhaps less stressful, as I myself often like to send my guests out of my kitchen) but cooking together, all hands on deck, reminds us that more than the hands of your own go into the creation of incredible food. Collectivity and love does not merely exist around the table but exists in the process of making food with your loved ones, too. Enjoy a chaos menu to your own palette this Valentines, and enjoy the massive clean up of dishes in communitas too.
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