Feast in Madrid

There is something beautiful and comforting, I think, about cooking a meal with a community of people. Though there have been occasions in my life when I wanted to be alone with only my thoughts as I sat at the counter mixing dough, I’ve discovered that there are also some times in which the phrase “too many cooks in the kitchen” simply does not apply. In our tiny Madrid airbnb, filled to the brim with six college kids, I experienced one of those times. Lauren and Dylan and I had just returned from an outing to the grocery store, toting garlic and pasta and not-quite-enough-tomatoes, and other foods that I can’t now remember. As I minced garlic, Lauren concocted a tomato sauce and Dylan messed around with the oven, perplexed as he tried to figure out how to properly heat it. Gabe entered the mix with enough tomatoes to feed a small kingdom, and began chopping. Meanwhile, Alex attended to the playlist which consisted mainly of latin jazz, I think. After two weeks of eating bread and hummus for more meals than I’d like to admit, reentering a kitchen felt empowering and relieving at the same time. Then, to sit down at a table with these people I had grown to love and share a meal that we collectively created felt like going home. I thought back to this time as I weeded a seemingly endless bed of onions the following week, and felt relief.

One result of cooking with a full kitchen is that it's nearly impossible to know exactly what amounts of each ingredient went into a dish. One person adds a little of this, another person adds some of that and eventually you have a meal. That being said, I couldn't tell you if I tried what our tomato sauce recipe was, or what ingredients went into the salad dressing, but it was good.