COOKING

Size and Shape Matters

Stop thinking about that — I’m talking about food

Ryan Chin
Rooted
Published in
5 min readJul 29, 2024

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Author Photo

“How should I cut this cucumber?” asks my girlfriend, Shaunna.

I grab it off the counter, hold the footlong-plus beast below my waist for a moment, and laugh, “I need to chop this quick. It’s making me feel inadequate.”

Shaunna laughs, too, and we kiss in my never-remodeled 1970s kitchen, which has stained and worn Formica countertops and granite-patterned linoleum. It could be considered retro at this point, but in its condition, it’s just worn and old.

I’m in the process of setting up a badass outdoor cook area and plan to remodel my kitchen with good lighting. One day, I’ll be a bald middle-aged Chinese foodie and fitness influencer sexy-slicing and dicing with my shirt off. For now, I’ll just write about cucumbers.

The cucumber will stand on its own in a cucumber salad, so I want pieces roughly the size of grapes. First, I chop the massive phallic symbol in the middle. Even cut in half, it’s still porn-star worthy. After quartering the halves lengthwise, I cross-cut the slices into the desired sizes. It’s an English cucumber, so there’s no need to peel or deseed it.

I use a clever for most of my prep work. I love its heavy feel and the deep ring it makes…

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Ryan Chin
Rooted

Author of The Big Head Diaries, stories of a lab from NZ, and Without Rain, a multimedia memoir. Email:thechinproject@gmail.com