Raw. Uncooked.
“Holy crap. It’s raw! It’s raw meat you’re licking!” I get that all the time. ALL of the time. Pork chops, chicken wings, spring roll filling, omelette, essentially all things that require a certain amount of marination before being transported to the stove for a good cook. How do you know if the seasoning is enough? How do you know your pork chop has the right pinch of salt and five-spice powder? You stick your finger/spoon/chopstick in the mix, and you taste it. Hey, how about just eyeballing it? Or you know when you know? Probably, but I’m no cooking prodigy. So I taste. For years I’ve watched all the women in my household cook, and I’ve never for once questioned the number of e.coli bacteria and other cringeworthy micro-organisms they could have ingested from tasting raw food. Why risk having bland pork chops while all you can do is have a little taste of the marinate? has since become my seasoning philosophy. That mouthwatering glistening caramelized pork chop does not come from a recipe with 2 teaspoon of sugar and 1 teaspoon of salt. It comes from a process of throwing in a few pinches of spices, tasting, throwing in some more and repeat until you get the right flavor. Some people call that reckless living; I call that cooking with freedom.
Raw. Unfiltered.
If I had let my emotions guide, I would have given the finger, I would have screamed out a clear and loud chain of profanities that had been accumulated for as long as I remembered. It’s tempting, isn’t it – the urge to pour that anger, that shame and that guilt on somebody else when things fail? It feels good to shower ourselves in self-victimizing thoughts, believing we are better than that and we have done nothing wrong. It feels good for a while, and then it doesn’t. Releasing those raw emotions is not going to turn around a poor plan or salvage a relationship based on a shaky foundation. It’s true raw emotions are intense and terrifying: they can drive us crazy, drown us in a world of despair, but they are also healing and precious: they allow us to reach rock-bottom before realizing that only we can help ourselves get back to the top again. Instead of giving the finger and screaming out profanities that promise nothing but a short-lived euphoria, I’d say we keep calm and let the anger distill into pure strength and wisdom. Plus, not everybody deserves to see the raw us anyway.
