My Best Restaurant is at Home!

After trying  going out and enjoying different kind of restaurants, I came to the conclusion that the best food is at home. There are many reasons why. Some of them are well-known, some of them not. The first good reason is that you know what is inside what you are eating and this is very important in my eyes. The second reason is that it is a very challenging art to cook if you want to be audacious while being limited by various constraints: earthly limits, religious limits and endless inventiveness. Sometimes I feel like a scientific researcher doing experiments in a lab or like an engineer creating a new engine especially since I have some chemistry and physics background. In the same way, I sometimes feel like an artist finishing his or her work.

Fortunately, at the beginning of my career as a "scientist" cook, I used my husband as a guinea pig. The fact that he is still alive is a living proof of my cooking proficiency. Then, our children could join our family and enjoy my experiments. I think they enjoy them especially on Shabbes. Since the industrialization of food production, knowing what you put in your mouth can be really challenging for both health and kashrus purposes. Both are sometimes connected and sometimes not. My son told me once that as far as he can remember, he always saw me reading the ingredients of products before buying them. Indeed, this is the benefit of eating what you buy and cook:- you have the possibility to double check what's inside before and then you can select the quality and the quantity. Of course, I am limited by money, health, time, choice (range) and also kashrus laws. But on the other hand, the more demanding the task, the more challenging and the more creative it can be.

One of the objections could be that when you go to the restaurant, you don't have to work but just to sit and be served. This a valid argument, but I for myself enjoy cooking and prefer cooking to writing in a blog and furthermore the more you throw yourself into something, the more you enjoy it. Without forcing them or encouraging them, I have influenced my children. They began fighting with me to have the right to cook because at the beginning, I did not want to hand over control of the kitchen to anybody else. Cooking is a reward for them and when asked at school what their favorite hobby is the answer of three of them (including my eldest son) was cooking with Mum. Now, if I need it, I can just rest and let my children cook.

To make a long story short, I highly recommend to anybody to check what they are eating and to enjoy both the science and the art of cooking.