dinner serenade...

Posted: 23/12/2009 2:49:12 p.m.

What did we do before ipods? What did we do before you could make a playlist to suit every mood? I can’t remember, but it must have been a pain. I guess we fiddled around with CDs. No, I remember - we made mix tapes! God that makes me feel old....

I have about 2000-odd songs on my ipod, which doesn’t actually seem like a lot for a lifetime. So maybe I'm not so old after all. With the sounddock, the ipod is the stereo, so no longer do I have to wade through a whole album and put up with the average songs. No, I have my 2000-odd songs divided into all kinds of lists. Eating music, bath music, kiwiana, favourite singalong songs, favourite soppy love songs….. and, of course, cooking music. My friend Wendyl Nissen recently posted something on Facebook about cooking up a batch of one of her green cleaning products to music, which made me realise I’m not the only one who does this! The music informs the food, perhaps? Makes sense to me…

The music I like to cook to varies wildly. It really depends a lot on what I’m cooking. Savoury cooking – dinner, in general – requires something with a bit of a groove. My ‘cooking music’ playlist has lots of stuff I can sing and dance along to – everything from Justin Timberlake to Black Eyed Peas to Johnny Cash. A Boy Named Sue is perfect stir-fry music. A bit of Bob Dylan or Powderfinger (turn My Happiness up loud and get the dishes done in double-quick time) works for me for chopping and prepping. And anything by Don McGlashan – my musical crush since I was 17 – is good for everything, especially his fabulous solo album Warm Hand, which is poetry and melody and longing and quirky stories all rolled into one lush package. Sometimes I like to listen to tango music, and since my kitchen is a galley I can practice my ochos while I move between stove and chopping board. I have an excellent playlist that I made for my tango partner, Daniel, of modern music suitable for tango dancing. This has all kinds of unlikely stuff including David Bowie’s Sorrow (genius), Fat Freddy’s Drop This Room and the Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil. It makes perfect sense to me that music that works for tango, that most soulful of dances, also works for cooking.

This may sound weird, but when I’m concentrating on cooking, with a musical accompaniment, I sometimes enter a kind of blissful state. I think it’s what psychologists and people much brainier than me call ‘flow’ – perfect absorption in a task, with highly productive results. It’s the same feeling, in fact, that I get when I am dancing tango. That kind of absorption that excludes all other thought, so it’s actually totally relaxing. This is what I mean when I tell people I find cooking relaxing, and they often look at me like I’m a bit mad. But it’s not the kind of cooking you do when you get home at 7pm, starving, and have to get something on the table. Is that ever relaxing for anyone? No, I’m talking about the kind of cooking you do when you have no particular time pressure, and no-one else around to distract you. It’s when I find I’m at my most creative, and often come up with new ideas. Just today for example, I was inspired in the most unlikely way by a jar of cranberry sauce, to come up with a fruit mince for people who hate fruit mince - an anti-xmas-mince pie, featuring cranberries, dates and dark chocolate. I think it’s pretty good.

Speaking of baking – I find baking requires music with a little bit more heart and soul. I’m sure my brown sugar meringues today came out better because they were made to Nina Simone singing Feeling Good and Moby’s Why Does my Heart Feel so Bad? And a little bit of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song doesn’t go astray either, for extra sweetness. And my all-time favourite singalong song goes well with any type of cooking. Roger Miller’s You Can’t Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd (I never said I was averse to total cheese) can’t help but make you smile, no matter how crappy the day has been. I find it a perfect philosophy for life: “You can’t rollerskate in a buffalo herd; you can’t drive around with a tiger in your car, but you can be happy if you’ve a mind to”. And that is what we call kitchen wisdom.