I love cooking and I cook every day. Of the three meals a day, it is usually dinner that I spend the most time cooking. I usually start preparing the meal at about 5pm and we have dinner about 7 to 7.30pm.
When I’m cooking, I like to listen to music. The up-beat music can get me going, but my favourite background music is jazz. I feel that listening to jazz stimulates my inspiration and creativity.
I like turning on the jazz program on the radio at 5:30, and six o’clock in the evening is the only time for listening to the news in our house. Since the lockdown, I’ve been tempted to follow the news about Covid-19, but having depressing news all day is not good for one’s mental health, so we decided to only listen to the news once a day, between 6 and 6.30pm.
So, if I start preparing dinner at 5 o’clock, the background music will be jazz, news and jazz. However, I recently saw one of my writer friends sharing a video and today I started preparing without any music.
Delicious food has a delicious sound.
Simply listening to your cooking sounds is relaxing, chopping vegetables, grating ginger, peeling off the shells of prawns, the sound of a wok and a spatula colliding when you are stir-frying, the sound of steam blowing up through the gaps in a bamboo steamer. I listened to the natural sounds of the cooking process at my kitchen.
Good chefs know what they are doing. Their cooking sounds confidently rhythmical. If you are angry or stressed out when you are cooking, your cooking could sound aggressive, although chopping vegetables is a good way to relieve your frustration.
While I was carefully listening to my cooking sound yesterday, I remembered that I always love to listen to the soothing sound of a stew simmering on the fireplace in winter. Sometimes it’s nice to be silent and enjoy the sound of the food itself because your delicious cooking must have a delicious sound.
