FUNGUZZ

It’s 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. I’m behind the kitchen bar, cutting parsley and tapping my foot to a reggae tune by The Groove Armada. Ayesha is next to me watching over the couscous and dal on the stove. The smell of boiling chickpeas floods the kitchen – warm and sweet like freshly baked bread. A whiff of parsley – cool and slightly bitter – arrives at my nostrils as I slice up the brilliant green herb.

Tonight’s stir-fry: tomatoes, carrots, radishes, sweet peas, yellow bell peppers, eggplant, coriander, and a little bit of every spice and sauce in the house. Another day it might have been red cabbage, cucumber, squash, mushrooms, broccoli, and lemon juice. The combination is different every day.

We take time to wash and cut all of the fresh vegetables carefully, make certain everything is just so. Procrastination meets efficiency. We’ve perfected our cooking routine: dal cooks the longest, therefore it’s the first on the stove; next is couscous or rice; finally we cut up the stir-fry and sauté the vegetables in the biggest pan. While everything simmers to perfection, we lay bread, cheese, carrots, and hummus out on a plate, set the table, and pour wine.

Few things bring such thorough satisfaction as cooking a first class meal and consuming it in a cozy atmosphere. We eat unhurriedly in silence, savoring every bite, thinking about the music.

I dip a piece of bread into the bright yellow dal in a half-circle motion and take a bite. I lick my fingers. Then I sink my fork into the colorful mound of vegetables on my plate. The spice is heady and makes me reach over for the wine glass. The couscous and dal together are like a warm hug. Ayesha and I exchange smiles and little moans of pleasure across the table. Expensive hummus. Expensive bread. Expensive cheese. This is the only way to be decadent.

We finish eating, clean the table and wash the dishes. We take several minutes on the couch to enjoy the food-coma-afterglow. If we hadn’t quit last week, we’d be smoking.

It is now after 10 p.m. Both of us have colossal backlogs of homework to take care of. We could have wolfed down a sandwich and maximized study time, but instead we chose to spend the precious hours making food. But who really gives a fuck about what Philip H. Pollock III has to say on Bivariate Regression? Time enjoyed is never time wasted.