I'm sure it is! Unfortunately Mom just adds more and more flour directly to the drippings. And then adds more flour. The end result is a watery flour soup.
I just have to add: the way you describe food in your posts always seems so... magical? Like you are creating a symphony of food.
Maybe I just need more coffee?
That is an apt description of how food works for me. As a symphony is a blend of various sounds, blended together with timing and structure, to create something more than any one instrument (yes even more than a great pipe organ) can provide, so to it is with food. Each food we eat is a combination of flavors, as in bitter, sweet, sour, salt, and umami. The blending of these flavors creates a unique imprint in our brain that says, carrot, or potato, or stew, or whatever it is that we percieve as the flavor of something.
Great cooking is the management of various techniques, coupled with skillfull blending of already existing flavors to create something that is more than the individual foods and flavors.
But where music, even as it excites joy, exuberence, and emotions, uses on.ly the sense of sound, food uses the senses of sound, sight, taste, smell, and touch to excite and create joy, disgust, sate our appetite. Is it any wonder that we consider great cooking an art? And if we couple our artistic side, with the scientific, or engineering side of our brain, and learn to understand the cooking processes, and what they do to the foods, and We are then more able to create great food. The artistic side comes in the skillful blending of flavors to create something magical (not that I'm always so skillful, but I try
). But that blending also uses scientific method, that is, think of something that might work (hypothesis), use various techniques expected to produce certain results (theory), make the food and taste it. Record the results (make a recipe if it tastes good).
Cooking satisfies my need for sustenance, for artistic creation, and for scientific invention. It also satisfies a need for social acceptance (people want me there to prepare meals, makes me feel good, and that I have worth not only to myself, but to others).
All in all, cooking, boiled down to its simplest form, is playtime, and fun.
Seeeeeeya; Chief Longwind of the North