Chop Chop – Ilana Sharp

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

For most of my life I’ve worked as a cook to bring in the bucks and I still do now. Each year, in a quiet little commercial kitchen across the other side of town I churn out three and a half thousand meals while running a zillion circles around the middle island bench where I chop, chop, chop. I make soups and main meals and always desserts. Monday is cake,Tuesday is something fruity and Wednesdays are always ‘naughty dessert,’ the ones that make you feel like a kid when you eat them. Vanilla slice. Ice cream sundaes. Trifle with strawberry jelly and whipped cream and if you’re really going all out, chocolate curls.

But I digress. Or maybe not.
You see the thing about cooking and writing is that they are by nature the same. You start with an idea. You search around to see if someone else has done something like it and if so how they managed. You get your tools; your knife and board, spices and oils, your laptop and notebook and pens. You just go ahead and get it done, step by step and word by word. You hope that it will look how it is on your head. You hope it will taste good. You hope someone else might like it.
You put it out before someone you love or maybe someone you don’t know.
‘Here,’ you say, ‘try this.’ And often times they will.

Here’s the other thing.
When you cook, when you write, you get the breathing space to piece things together. Maybe it’s a dish, or a story or even a part of yourself.

I cook to write to write to cook.
At work I think about the roast shoulder of lamb I want to make on the weekend. Or the orange zest I’ll add to the tahini biscuits I tried last week because I think they might taste better if I do. At night when I lie in bed and my body is sore from cooking I think about the puzzle pieces of the story I’m writing and how they might fit together. I listen to the cicadas and I feel lucky. Because I can eat what I like and say what I like and that feels like freedom.

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