Cooking with Chunks

I’m the type of per­son who has ram­bling feet. I need to keep things chang­ing, even in a small way, in order to keep myself happy. Some con­sis­tency cer­tainly is nice but I find that in prac­tice, con­sis­tency is almost inevitable and it’s more ful­fill­ing to push away from the norm.

On the other hand, I love the rich, beau­ti­ful con­text that comes with con­sis­tency; those lovely pieces of art and design where expe­ri­enc­ing it is expe­ri­enc­ing a mil­lion tiny thoughts and feel­ings of the piece’s creator(s). So it’s inside of this seem­ingly impos­si­ble to man­age back­drop that I bring forth a cook­ing metaphor.

I really enjoy cook­ing. I have no spe­cial skill at it; I try to keep both vari­ety and health in mind and to stay out of the way of the nat­ural flavours, but beyond that I’m no expert.

One small cook­ing joy of mine is to cut the food into large chunks — the big­ger the bet­ter. I rough cut every­thing: whole cloves of gar­lic, large pieces of zuc­chini, whole olives, mas­sive pieces of arti­choke, what­ever. I’ve noticed that while cut­ting things small ensures a more blended, homoge­nous flavour use­ful in some con­texts, large chunks allow for flavour pock­ets, unique mouth­fuls and some surpise. Each mouth­full is dif­fer­ent. With this comes mouth­fuls that are bet­ter or worse than oth­ers. It has a layer of dis­o­nance, of incon­sis­tency. While I have had some mind-blowing puréed soups that deserve a shout-out here, I keep com­ing back to that beau­ti­ful con­trolled chaos that comes from rough cut, unpol­ished raw mate­ri­als. A mas­ter would play, mix­ing large chunks with finely cut ele­ments and flavour­ful sauces, cre­at­ing a super-meal, but I digress.

And since I enjoy a lit­tle dis­so­nance here and there, I also bow out of hand­ing you this painfully basic metaphor on a sil­ver plat­ter — you can pull it back to design and your life in your own lovely way.