Time

A place to be on time.

I feel at home in my kitchen, and whenever I show up there I feel like I’m on time. I feel like an aikido master, standing by the flow of people, seasons, ingredients, experiments, expiration dates, happy occasions and ordinary dinners, redirecting the energy of one into another, around me, towards eternal balance, wisdom and ultimate good.

I fooled you little by little in this short book. You learned to shop, to wait, to draw the line. To choose your Something, to feed the oven, to leave room under the lid, to trust. Add it all up and it takes forever. Who has time to discover their ultimate formula of a Trail Mix? Who has space for a 6-liter, slowly diminishing container of homemade sauerkraut? Who has enough years and audacity to make all possible kinds of bigos? Only immortals.

Speaking of immortality, most forms of art last way longer than culinary arts. You can record your music, hang the canvas above the couch, put the statue in the corner, and leave the writing on the wall. Then half-sit at the table, inhale the most artistic omelet, and move on a few minutes later, leaving an empty plate behind.

Cooking is weird. On one hand it starts as early as you can remember, with checking on bulk-fermenting sourdough in the fridge before dawn; on the other hand it barely ends. It has hyper-local impact, but it also gives you an Archimedean point of reference that lets you judge all other cooking. It is intensely personal and scaringly public.

Cooking is not the art of making food.
Cooking is not the art of making a cook.
Cooking is not the art of making a meal, an event, a menu or a cuisine.
Cooking is the art of making time.

My most favorite sound in the kitchen is when bulk-fermented dough is taking its sweet time to slide onto the giant cutting board before I slice it and shape it into loaves. It does not care that I still need to make a something, an anything, go buy a few nothings and fit a few trays of everything into the oven while I preheat it for the bread bake. It balances my impatience with a single, slightly annoyed “Uff!” it makes as it finally leaves the container.

I’m not going to teach you to make bread in the last chapter, because it’s a whole separate book. But I will give you my two cents on why it is all worth it after all.

To be on time you have to keep making time. By stopping time. By investing time. By stealing time. By taking time.

The kitchen starts out as a place to take care of the body, to feed the hungry. But eventually it becomes a place of taking time to be on time, of having the courage to live an ordinary life.

As Oscar Wilde said, simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex.

With love,
Dad.
October 7th, 2026.