Sustenance

Wow, I guess my latest attempt to revive this blog kinda died out again. Anyways, I finally found some motivation to write something on here.

Yesterday at the Welcome Back Jason draft, a disagreement arose mainly between me and a friend about exactly what constituted "cooking". He was eating some pasta that he had made and brought from home, and had heated it up in the microwave. I brought up the point of how I thought it was cool that he cooked the pasta himself, to which he replied that he didn't consider making pasta to be real cooking. "You just add heat and mix the stuff together, it doesn't take any skill at all," was basically how his argument went. Ironically, the first defintion of "cooking" given by dictionary.com is:
To prepare (food) for eating by applying heat.

So I stand by my point. :P

Now, I know that my cooking skills aren't that great, so stuff that would probably seem cool or special for me to cook probably seem pretty ordinarly to most people. I guess my friend might be used to making more exotice dishes, and thus he doesn't consider making simple pasta and meat sauce to be real cooking. I would agree that simple things such as mixing cereal and milk or preparing a sandwich probably shouldn't count as cooking, (though Tales of Symphonia would disagree :P), but I think that anything which requires the use of a stove or oven should be compmlex enough to be classified as cooking. I guess sandwiches could be considered just "food preparation" or something like that.

Under the above definition, however, Wen pointed out that simply microwaving food would also be considered as cooking. Though I think most people, myself included, would reject the idea of microwaving stuff as real cooking, technically it is. You'd be surprised at how many things can be microwaved and still taste good, even if they say on the box that they're not microwavable. :P I usually end up microwaving a lot of my meals even now. Why? I guess it's just 'cause I'm lazy...and want to have more time to do other stuff. It's not that I don't enjoy cooking or anything, I've probably just gotten into the habit of it, and while I'm at school, I haven't really been living in an environment that encourages me to explore the culinary arts. Duy doesn't really "cook" at all either. We used to cook more when Bao was here, but we only cooked once this year, and that was when we went over to Ambrose's house and had planned to cook stuff together with them. I was supposed to do some cooking with Wen and Duy during exams this term, but then it didn't happen due to time constraints, and we ended up playing more Tales instead. :P Playing through the game a second time, it's a lot more interesting when I notice the foreshadowing and other references to things in the story that they player isn't supposed to know about yet. But that's probably a topic for another entry.

So what do you guys think? Where is the line between "cooking" and just "preparing food"?