Cooking. Recipes. The Almighty Kitchen. Truly, an institution, and, a multi-faceted entity.
However. It seems like there is a clear distinction to be made here. Either people like to cook, or they do not. They seem to be good at cooking, or they are not. Everyone has their talents, after all.
But let’s focus on the cooks. The people who like to be in kitchen and work their magic. There is a wide variety of approaches here…. let’s face it. This spans from the follow-the-recipe-to-the-letter types…. to the dash-of-this-dash-of-that types. And everything in between.
Personally, I fall closer to the “dash of this” category. I’ve never met a recipe that needed to be followed. In fact, I’m not so great at following anything. But the beauty of this entire kitchen schematic? There is no right or wrong.
I have tasted the recipe-to-the-letter-perfect results. Absolutely delicious. And I have sampled the foods from the outer limits of the recipes. Positively delicious too.
But either way…. there are things which happen in the kitchen which are questionable, at best. Take for example, the dry meat rub. Does anyone really like this process? One little bit? I say not. The mixing of the spices is not so bad. But the you have to go through the messy process of rubbing these spices to and fro, getting your hands all raw-meaty and dry-rub-lumpy. The pot roast doesn’t enjoy it either…. I wouldn’t think.
Okay, enough of that. What about chopping onions? Sometimes, there are no ill-effects. But more often than not, you start going temporarily blind, midway through the chopping process. And then the tears manifest. And before you know it, you have a large, very sharp knife in hand, flailing away near your other hand’s digits. AND….you can’t see a darn thing. The potential for a kitchen mishap is remarkable.
How about the lemon zest? Again, without losing several layers of skin from your knuckles, there is no good way to do this, by grater. You can buy one of those little peeler-zester tools, but you would have to be very serious about your lemon-zesting. I, for one, can not make this type of commitment.
The list goes on and on. Potato peeling, gravy stirring, egg boiling, peanut butter mixing, and many more. They make them all look easy on that fast-play-Facebook-how-tos. Nonetheless.
When you think about it, though, in each case…. the end result is all for the better. In each instance, (the meat rub, the onion chop, the lemon zest) process leads to the magical outcome. The end product is SO much better because of the down and dirty process.
And THAT, is very true, in our day-to-day of things. Sometimes our lives ask us to go through things which are highly unpleasant. There are times… days… weeks…. when things seem difficult. Hard. Strenuous. But, finally, we are done. Our timer dings. We get pulled from the heat …. right out of the oven. We come out on the other side of that very hard thing we are going through.
If we are lucky, not only do we emerge…. we turn out all for the better. The recipe led us to this. Our knuckles had to get scraped when we zested. But now… we are complete with that task… that process… that thing. We’ve learned. We grew.
Yes. The Kitchen. We face the challenge and we try our best. Sometimes we follow the recipe, and sometimes we do not. But we have to go through the process. And in the end? We leaned something new. AND. We get to enjoy the tasty dish. Whatever it may be.
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“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
― Albert Einstein
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“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire
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“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
― Socrates
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