January 1st, 2013

A shy little sun shines on the black dog, curled up in his basket. He’s sleeping away bad memories of recent fireworks. His snores echo through the room where the Christmas tree now looks somewhat lost. Its glorious, dreamlike appearance has gone overnight, and left it tired and dusty, with branches weighed down by sparkling decorations. The whole looks totally out-of-place, but for the lingering scent of pine in the room.

I know that taking all the lights and glass decorations down will brutally display the tree in its most vulnerable state, fully dried-out after all those weeks indoor.  This will then justify my next step. I will put the tree outside for neighborhood boys to take it to its final destination: the huge tree burning pile for the 6^th of January. Ending the whole festive period. After the recent celebratory days, the joys of meeting up with family, friends, many late evenings filled with lots of good wines and indulgent meals, I am now looking forward to this quiet first month of the year.

But the taking down of the tree will have to wait until tomorrow. This New Year kicks off with the revival of my blog. The new course of my blog will make itself clearer over the next posts, since I haven’t been able to get it clearer than this: I know I want to write again, about cooking and the food I make during this coming year. For me cooking is real. Let’s follow a whole cycle, a whole year. What do I come up with?

The need to cook, to feed yourself is a constant, one of the few things that in an ever-changing world remains the same. You can have your life shaken up by fireworks of many sorts. Or you can find yourself dried-out and dusty, not knowing which way to turn to make things better. Or indeed the opposite: all of a sudden you’re flying sky-high to the top of the world. You still need to simply eat. Everybody needs food.  Period. And the cooking and eating of food can help you recuperate, will keep you grounded, will make you able to cope with your live. No need to be dead serious or trendy lighthearted about it: cooking is like life itself. Hardly always celebratory. But necessary just the same. It’s like Christopher Kimball puts it: ‘Cooking is about putting food on the table night after night, and there isn’t anything glamorous about it’ (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/cooks-illustrateds-christopher-kimball.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0).

So here we go.