Last night I spent a little over an hour making mac and cheese.
It's a recipe we've prepared before, and it requires a whole bunch of effort. Butternut squash must be peeled, cubed, and roasted, and then blended up in a food processor. After that, it's mixed with the macaroni and a buttery nutmeg/rosemary infused sauce in a large pan. From there, it's poured into a casserole dish, topped with panko and baked.
It requires a significant period of sustained focus, as do many recipes, and at the end of the process, you have...mac and cheese. Delicious, flavorful, utterly satisfying, it's vastly better than the boxed and powdered equivalent.
But it takes five times more time to prepare than a buck-fifty box of Kraft. It is inconvenient. It provides no immediate gratification. It is not easy to the point of mindlessness.
As I puttered about in the kitchen, sipping an inexpensive Cabernet with a chill synth-jazz theremin album humming through my headphones, I wondered at how we use our time and effort.
Because making the meal was work. It required effort towards a singular purpose over time. I was required to focus, measuring out ingredients, prestaging them neatly in bowls and cups. Given the ingredients, that effort went back even further. The butternut squash was my own, a cupboard-stored winter squash from my late fall harvest. The tablespoon of chopped rosemary was clipped fresh from one of the two plants in my herb garden, five minutes before it was tossed into the pan.
The meal drew fractionally from many, many hours of labor, digging and composting, seedsaving and planting, watering and weeding. A portion of the sweat of years, all contributing to the table.
To what better use could I have put that time? Because the gardening was a pleasure, and the preparation was a pleasure, and the meal was a pleasure.
Should I have been doomscrolling instead? Or passively consuming a prepackaged entertainment?
That would have robbed me of the delight of the work of my hands, and the flavor of time well-spent.
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