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The Time I Almost Drowned a Man in Soup
When solitude and boredom have you at your wits’ end, repetitive meals become a conspiracy to drive you crazy.
I spent five weeks in France doing a “Work-away,” a program where you can stay somewhere for free in exchange for a few hours of work everyday. I stayed with an herbalist from Morocco on what I wouldn’t call a farm, more like an old rural French property with a large garden.
The Moroccan, this chill French guy named Mathias, me and occasionally the Moroccan’s girlfriend would each take turns cooking lunch and dinner. With fresh picked ingredients, it started out great but we were limited to the same four or five vegetables and if we picked something, we’d sometimes have to wait for more to grow, so we’d be limited to just one or two vegetables. I did however, enjoy the challenge of trying to come up with an 11th way to cook zucchini but things inevitably got repetitive.
The first time the Moroccan’s girlfriend came she immediately took control of preparing dinner. I was excited because I saw her in the garden, picking stuff I didn’t even notice we had and then in the kitchen chopping and tossing things around with confidence and ease. I saw her put the vegetables in a pot of boiling water and heard the blender but didn’t watch her prepare the…
