Potluck

Life is filled with a broad spectrum of experiences- experiences that may at some point question the very essence of your being. Although I am yet to spend three scores and ten years since my first cry, I feel I have great experiences that have etched the years I've spent with breath to my heart.

More often than not, many of my experiences have to do with food and that is because I relish good food and not necessarily because I'm obsessed with food. Fine🙄 it can be argued that I'm obsessed with food but to a larger extent with its preparation than with its consumption. All the same, that argument is not what this post is about.

Recently, I turned a year older and also launched into another scope of my life's vision. Every step of this new journey has been exciting, challenging and so demanding of my time including the time to cook and make spontaneous meals for myself and my family.

For someone who adores being in the kitchen and whipping up exciting recipes, I had imagined setting up a commercial kitchen would provide me more time to create my culinary fantasies but nope! It rather pushed me into human and physical resource management, customer service, and food criticism.

Honestly, being a food entrepreneur is a full-time job, and like a regular job, it occasionally questions my sanity and thought processes. Although this job has its perks and thrills and moments of eureka and it is something I've always wanted and still desire to thrive in, just knowing it is my job can make it feel a little less exciting sometimes.

So, with no time to sit and stare and almost no time to cook fancy meals, every bit of old food in my home and refrigerator has become more valuable as I have also lost the luxury of shopping for my home and personal kitchen. In the meantime, I've settled for potlucks - unplanned meals from leftover food. My favorite potluck this period is the experience I am about to share in this blog post.

I returned home late one night to realize the only cooked food in my house was the leftover beef stew I made some weeks back and you can guess, all the beef originally in this stew was now MIA except for the hides.

Normally, I should have picked up my phone and ordered food since I own a 24-hour ready-to-eat food supermarket but that felt too easy. The adventurous part of my brain pointed me to some forsaken sweet potatoes well hidden underneath my storage and my hands got itchy to reinvent my beef-less stew to something indulgent.

Before my brain realized what was happening, my hands had peeled, sliced, and oven-roasted those sweet potatoes. Same hands also charred some prawns, boiled an egg, and steamed some washed snails to go with my empty stew.

The sensations I felt when I took the first bite into this potluck were thrilling. My eyes welled with tears as I gently nibbled on the prawns and snails I cooked into this stew. The flavor of the stew had sipped into the hard-boiled egg through the pokes I had made on it and those sweet potatoes were seasoned with aromatic spices and drizzled with extra virgin olive oil before hitting the oven.

This potluck was a burst of flavor, everything in it was giving everything it was meant to give. I could not help but bless God who gave man the senses to deeply enjoy good food.

I may still not have so much time on my hands, and perhaps still struggle to find a balance between being a kitchen personality and a food entrepreneur but what I most certainly would do again is create more potlucks and enjoy them as best as I can because for God sake we only live once and "food" should be our favorite F-word😁