Welcome to my Laboratory
What you're looking at is chicken. Vegan chicken, that is. It's a recipe I recently got from my sister-in-law that has become a regular staple for me. It requires ingredients like Vital Wheat Gluten and Nutritional Yeast (both of which I had previously never heard of), although what I can't get over is the way the recipe produces a dough...a dough that then gets steamed into a solid state and somehow becomes these, for lack of a better term, blobs. Honestly, when I'm making it I can't help but feel like I'm some kind of scientist in a laboratory, you know, just growing chicken blobs from dough. As you do.
I've oft lamented the fact that I can't really create anything with my hands. I don't know how to make stuff. Art, crafts, homemade gifts. I don't have any skills that translate into creating anything that anyone would want. Or consider particularly well done. Writing really is my only creative vehicle, and on most days, this is enough. But on other days, I yearn to CREATE something from nothing. So I get a weird enjoyment out of creating these chicken blobs.
I turned my home into a laboratory again this weekend by attempting my first-ever batch of homemade mosquito repellant. Mosquitos really aren't an issue here in Southern California, and in all time I've lived in my house, I haven't had a problem. Imagine my surprise when a sneaky (and greedy) lone mosquito proceeded to bite me 10 times over the course of a 30-minute window while I sat in the backyard reading. My reaction was swift and unyielding, in that I am TAKING BACK MY YARD. It's now full of citronella plants, and I crushed a bunch of leaves yesterday and spent hours brewing my homemade concoction. I won't say it smells great (it doesn't), but I did sit outside yesterday for an hour, surrounded by my plants and covered in my homemade goop, and no mosquito dared approach. Creation at work.
And finally, again in the spirit of creation, I'm brainstorming some cookie ideas (ingredients and flavors), because what laboratory could be more fun than a baking laboratory??!! I'd love to be good enough at making cookies that people seek them out. Not a shop, necessarily, but maybe a friend will ask me to make cookies for her kid's birthday party. So the creation will continue. I think it's such a natural part of life, to want to take things that exist and turn them into other, more desirable, helpful (or delicious!) things. Here's to creation, of all sizes and scales!