My refuge is confined to the kitchen and the backyard. I am now a smoker. I smoke fairly constantly. I will smoke socially, I will smoke all night, I will smoke through the day. In my twenties, this would have been the cool kind of smoking, with the health risks and illegal extra ingredients. Now, in this decade of my life, itβs the kind of smoking that involves multiple trips to Bunnings, getting to know your butcher on a first-name basis, and promising your guests that the food will be ready in either 40 minutes or five hours.
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The smoked-meat indulgence is then coupled with the obsessive art of pickling. Who would have thought after all these years of serving milkshakes, coffees, acai bowls and the occasional crumpet in a mason jar, we would find they could also be used for preserving food?
I think I have realised that with everything else in the world unstable, and with any work put into my body doing little more than buying time in a losing game, the best investment I can make is devoting myself to the sandwiches of tomorrow. For it is my belief that society grows great when people prepare condiments for sandwiches that they themselves may never eat.
Of course, they do a little more than that, too. A disgusting ad for pasta sauce used to claim that when you cook, you βmake love to everyoneβ and while I find this a massive violation of marriage vows and food preparation, I cannot help but notice that I am using the smoke not just to flavour a slow-cooked pork shoulder for a brisk 14 hours, but as a way to bring people together and show them that, while we are all hurtling toward oblivion, as least we are headed there together.
