T and I: Cooking

T loves cooking. But those who simply love can't always be makers of what they love.

T is an excellent maker of food, not just a passive purveyor of it.

Let's say T's excellence as a cook comes from her investing a passionate interest in the process of it.

It all begins with step one--of germinating recipe-ideas. When T isn't hatching her own eggs, she is busy curating them. 

T garners recipes from diverse sources, ranging from Food Network shows, to the Internet, to her private memories of what her mother did during her days as a kitchen goddess.

Her goal is not simply to follow the recipes with a clerk-like fidelity to copying, but to interpret them in her own way.

In cooking, T is an interpreter, a transformer.

I, on the other hand, passively consumes the palate-pleasing palaces that T creates--not in the air, but inside the oh-so-solid universe of the oven and the skillet. It's not that I cannot cook; I can cook, but I can only cook what she already knows how to cook.

Cooking is not an activity in which I takes as much of a passionate interest as T does.

T is irked by I's disinterested approach to cooking. She tells I that the interest can be generated; T's belief is that an interest has to be cultivated, as nobody can be innately passionate about anything.

I sees the point. But howsoever much she tries, she just cannot seem to cultivate a passion about cooking.

To I The Food Network divas liquefy into gormandizing fat ladies.

T gallantly tries to encourage I in myriad ways. From pop quizzing ("So how would you make the tahini?" T would ask after she has interpreted a pre-existing tahini-recipe in her unique way) to memory-raking ("How did you make the pasta?" T would ask with an "Indian" prefix: Indians boil the pasta T says and then pours the Red Ragu on it--straight off the bottle. I feels considerably anachronistic), to cajoling ("I will be making a gigot d'agneau or a filet de boeuf sauce bearnaise, this weekend, what will you be making?" T queries I whose French doesn't exceed au revoir), she has tried everything in her book to break I's passivity.

But to no avail.