"You can go for a week without love - you will die without food."
- Cibo Matto

One of the advantages of my recent and blessedly brief period of unemployment is that it afforded me time to start cooking again.

I started out with a few simple pasta recipes, an Italian goulash I got from a cookbook and then baked ziti and pasta Alfredo from the back of Ronzoni boxes. Before long, I was chopping an onion, dicing a capsicum (I had to look that one up - it turned out to be a green pepper), and adding dashes of paprika, oregano, garlic and salt.

All the recipes served four to six, but I ate what I could and put the leftovers in the fridge to sustain me over the weeks.

Since then, I've been getting more creative, mixing my own selection of veggies, and serving it over rice, pasta or whatever else I can find (i.e., the leftovers mentioned above).

Now, none of this may sound like much of an achievement to the seasoned cooks out there, but I had fallen in my bachelor ways to eating only prepared foods, take-out, or ready-to-eat concoctions from the supermarket. It's nice to get back in touch with the preparation process again, and brings greater mindfulness to what I'm taking in to my body.