We were curious to know how Veronica started out cooking and baking, which foods she\u2019s made that have come out great and what her favorite thing to make recently has been. Veronica said, \u201cI\u2019ve baked since I was a little kid, like with my dad. Cooking I got into when I moved off campus. And so I cook most nights for my roommates. It\u2019s just satisfying to make things that other people enjoy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the summer, she got a chance to explore baking different cakes, now that she got mini cake pans and had different flavor combinations to try out. \u201cI thought of the sillier flavors. So I did sage and blackberry.\u201d That sounded like an interesting cake flavor, one that probably tasted and looked good. For another interesting cake, she tested out a pumpkin cake flavor as an option for her and her roommates\u2019 upcoming Thanksgiving, which she preferred over her pumpkin pie. The cake had pumpkin and salted caramel. That even sounded good to me, even though I don\u2019t like pumpkin!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When it came to cooking, Veronica\u2019s first time being off campus was during study abroad; this was the beginning of her cooking journey. She studied abroad in Denmark, though she said \u201cDenmark is a not so exciting food place.\u201d Her favorite meal she\u2019s cooked has been a Thai inspired chicken meatball soup, which came out successfully, since cooking meat felt a bit tricky in terms of making sure it\u2019s cooked all the way; people enjoying her food is very important to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After hearing about all this food, I was getting hungry. But I was also getting curious to see how Veronica saw her poetry being connected to her love for baking and cooking. \u201cI think I use a lot of baking metaphors,\u201d she said. \u201cRight now I\u2019m working on a poem that\u2019s about baking Christmas cookies and my family\u2019s history of that. My dad baked cookies and mailed them to all our extended family my whole childhood. And then part-way through highschool, he was just really busy\u2013 it was COVID at that point\u2013 and I had a lot more time, so I did it.” Now she\u2019s been mailing out cookies for the past couple of years! \u201c[It\u2019s] fun adding my own spin on that and it\u2019s kind of a metaphor for familial connection [and] the work it takes to keep in contact with people.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
After hearing that, I wanted to know more about the process of her baking and cooking and her poetry process, since I am not the most skilled in either. Veronica explained, \u201c I always like to find recipes; I\u2019ll read like 400 comments\u2013 every comment\u2013 on the recipe and be like \u2018Well they say this sixteen times and this like four times.\u2019\u201d She expressed that she wants her food to taste good but that she\u2019s very meticulous about looking at the information out there when it comes to researching recipes in the hopes of cooking and baking something. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an opposite sense, she thought it was a different process to write her poetry. \u201cWhen I\u2019m writing poetry, a lot of the time, I have an idea and I\u2019ll just word vomit onto that page and then just write all the ideas I have down and later come back to it.\u201d This question prompted her to say \u201cThat\u2019s funny, I hadn\u2019t thought of how opposite they are.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For her, food, in general, is a metaphor. \u201cBaking, especially, has very warm connotations, and so I like it in general as a way to talk about warm connections and close connections.\u201d Some of the poems she told me about had similar themes of family ties and bonding, like this one anecdote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know I have one poem about a story as a child where [my dad] would always use real vanilla and at some point I was with some close family friends, watching. I was like two or three, watching them bake. And apparently, I was like \u2018Where\u2019s the vanilla?\u201d I was shocked that you could bake something from a box mix as a little kid. That\u2019s another image from a different poem I have.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even though Veronica\u2019s process for each is different, baking and cooking and poetry all challenge her in similar ways. \u201cI\u2019ll think about both of them a lot in my head before I write them down. With recipes, I\u2019m reading all about them and with poems I\u2019m going over an idea and then I\u2019m thinking about it and I just have to do it all in one go,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ll plan out a baking recipe and then make a cake for four hours of the day or I\u2019ll think of a poem idea and be like \u2018Okay, I have to write everything about it and go back and connect the ideas that haven\u2019t connected already. When I\u2019m committed, I\u2019m going to commit to it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n After hearing her responses, I saw how vulnerable baking and cooking can be, similar to how poetry can be. The intricacies of care, attention and self-fulfillment by producing something that multiple people can enjoy, not just yourself, is resonant in Veronica\u2019s descriptions of her multiple crafts. Veronica showed me many different cake concoctions that she\u2019s made in the past. Check out this one, which she wanted everyone to see! We want to thank Veronica for taking the time to be interviewed by The Words<\/em> and allowing us into her creative world of baking, cooking and poetry and how connected they are for her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Jizelle Villegas ’26 For this month\u2019s Craft Corner, The Words sat down with Veronica Kruschel ’25 to talk about her creative side in cooking and baking and how creating things in the kitchen is connected to creating things on paper as a Creative Writing and Psychology double major.\u00a0 We were curious to know how […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"parent":9461,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-9469","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9469"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9587,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9469\/revisions\/9587"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/603\/2024\/12\/Craft-Corner-picture-1024x768.jpeg\")
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