Reasons for cooking

Bloggers on restaurants, lists, and pleasure

By Culinate staff

June 9, 2009

Some of our favorite food bloggers — Cathy Erway, Molly Wizenberg, and Michael Ruhlman — recently posted takes on the satisfactions of cooking at home.

For Erway, the pleasure (and the sense of control) she gets when cooking for herself were made manifest in a frustrating restaurant expedition with a two-hour wait.

For Wizenberg, who’s been busy helping a restaurant to open, fatigue drained her enthusiasm for cooking, so she made a list of her favorite, easy, go-to meals for home cooking, and found it wonderfully inspiring.

And for Ruhlman, the pleasure is in the physical work itself, plus the notion of honing a skill. Says Ruhlman:

Learning to cook . . . not only gives us the pleasure of working pleasing materials in our hands, the pleasure of craft, and a concrete result we can see and smell and taste and offer, the act itself truly does make us more human.