Tuesday - about leftovers
Cooking with leftovers is a performance, reaching for and recycling states of mind, feelings, trips, interactions.
We reinvent ourselves constantly. We are the leftovers of our time, again and again. Does this word have a positive or negative conotation? I guess that’s a personal answer depending on where you come from, where you’re based, how you grew up and so on.
Perhaps cooking with leftovers is a connection with ancestors lost (ones who realized the fruits of the hunt can be used later if properly stored), or with scarcer times, when using leftovers was a question of survival, but I think it’s always about a connection with ourselves, our history and it’s about our regenerative capacities.
Leftovers are not waste, they are about using something that’s already there, something that exists in one form, to create something new, something that will tell a whole other story. (Another art definition perhaps?)
For me, food is storytelling, making up phrases that work together with other phrases or stand up on their own and the leftovers of those stories are the starting point of new ones, spin-offs with new protagonists.
Cooking with leftovers makes you aware of consumption, make you aware of your own habits, makes you more confident of your choices, puts things into perspective, humbles you,makes you more creative.
So my challenge for you (and me) this Tuesday is look around the fridge and the pantry and allow yourself to create something, without any expectations, self doubt or judgement.
My experiment took this cookie form, perhaps a manifestation of where my longing for comfort after a big life change meets my healthy nutrition values.
Adaptogen chaga cookies with rolled oats, puffed quinoa, an overripe banana(classic one), some tahini at the bottom of a jar, some soy milk(that I must use before it’s too late), chaga powder.
More reading and inspiration on the subject:
