Book Review: "Finding Yourself in the Kitchen" by Dana Velden

Finding Yourself in the Kitchen: Kitchen Meditations and Inspired Recipes from a Mindful Cook

The new year found me aspiring to kitchen confidence and proficiency. You know, storage containers with actual lids in close proximity, organized meal plans linked to grocery lists, vegetable drawers that hold foodstuffs that don’t look like middle school life science experiments, maybe a clue as to what exactly is in the freezer compartment and when it might have joined our household.

So I bought a book.

This is not that book.

I’ll review that book later. It’s got lots of practical ideas and it will probably get me a bit further down the road toward organization.

Here I’m reviewing Finding Yourself in the Kitchen because this book I checked out on Libby to read for next week’s book club meeting reminded me of the why of the organization project. Which is, I do enjoy cooking and I love my family and friends.

When I cook, I want to experience that love and the joy of creating something tasty, whether for two or for two dozen. And it’s hard to experience that when it feels like your kitchen is putting up barriers - lack of appropriate pans or tools, ingredients that are missing or that have expired in obscurity, distractions in the form of a crowded kitchen counter or leftovers screaming to be eaten first.

Dana Velden has spent time in Zen kitchens, literally. She lived in a Buddhist monastery several years ago after a series of personal challenges - death, divorce, illness, absorbing lessons of mindfulness. Her experiences there inspired the writing she would later do for the food blog Kitchn. Each Sunday she posted a short meditative piece about going deeper into our practice of cooking. She was as surprised as anyone that there turned out to be so much to be written on the topic. Those meditations provided the beginnings of Finding Yourself in the Kitchen, published by Rodale in 2015.

Velden’s book of meditations reminded me that before I got into organization, I needed to show my kitchen some love. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done anything to improve its general appearance. If I could do that, maybe I’d enjoy spending more time in the kitchen, some of which could be spent organizing.

One of Velden’s first suggestions for the improvement of both form and function was to keep a bowl of lemons on the table. While I haven’t yet managed that yet (add lemons to grocery list; go to grocery store; buy lemons; pick a pretty, not too large bowl; arrange lemons), I took a look around my kitchen and considered what it might make the most difference. Polishing up the 1970s era wood cabinets seemed like a good and impressive start. I broke out the Old English, put on a podcast to listen to because I’m not yet Zen enough to take on jobs like that without a bit of distraction, and polished away.

Once I was satisfied that the cabinets were improved, I tackled the Magnetic Poetry kit on the fridge, the 500 or so tiny magnets of words that my children and grandchildren arrange into poetry or sometimes just bizarre messages. They were scattered across the front of the fridge, many adhering not just magnetically but through the stickiness that comes with baby fingers. Considering the tendency of the middle little, Grady, to cast them to the floor with great enthusiasm, I shifted all of them up to the top part of the fridge. I gave them and the fridge a wipe-down.

The results pleased me beyond my expectations. I had not been aware these things were weighing on me, but at some level they had. Now I knew. Velden’s encouragement to “…use our time in the kitchen like a counterweight against the ever-present distractions of our thinking and scheming and screen-gazing so that we can be pulled, almost without our knowing, into a more balanced way of being” hit home. She talks, too, about negative emotions like anger or fear, assuring the reader that “Most of our kitchen fears are little fears, and little fears are a good place to start” the project of learning to work alongside our larger worries and fears.

The small steps I took haven’t solved the larger problems of meal plans and too many kitchen items that are not needed. And yet, something did shift just a little. The butternut squash I’d picked up on the last big grocery shopping trip found its way into a yummy soup. The shitake mushrooms did not die in vain but offered a focus for risotto. The scallions went into darn near everything, providing a little kick in an omelet, a salad, a quiche. Just wanting to be in a slightly nicer-looking kitchen made it easier to spend time there, contemplating uses for veggies that didn’t include tossing them onto the compost pile.

I haven’t even mentioned Velden’s recipes. While this isn’t a traditional cookbook, she does provide a handful of recipes, almost all of which I now plan to try. Lemon curd, a fruit and custard tart, potato leek soup, salsa verde, her mom’s spice cake recipe, and more. Having read the why of these recipes, I’m ready for the how of them. Which means that I am investing in my own hard copy of Finding Yourself in the Kitchen, and returning the copy checked out via the Libby app on my phone.

For readers looking for thoughtful kitchen inspiration, this slim volume may help remind you of just how satisfying cooking can be. Check it out on the Libby app through Moon Lake Library’s Camellia Net digital library.