This week I’ve been doing some experimental cooking. Monday was a Tai-noodle thing with peanuts
and chicken and about a half-dozen spices I’ve not worked with – totally new
recipe under the gun of people leaving at a certain time and there I am in the
kitchen trying to make things work on time and under budget (priced coconut
milk lately?). Tuesday was curry chicken
with potatoes. Again, something I’ve
never cooked before. Thursday I tried a
new pasta-salad with Chimichurri instead of the usual Italian dressing
stuff. Familial reviews for all three were
positive. But that’s not today’s point.
As I was slaving away in the kitchen during this thrice-fold
event, the thought kept occurring about how much time & effort &
preparation & different ingredients all this took. Time slowed.
I was clumsy & stumbly & uncertain & huffy at times (likin’ me
some ampersands this morning). Had to
refer to the recipes between steps and it just didn’t flow the way I like to
have my cooking flow.
Can we say ‘learning curve’?
Case in point – I bet the average home-cook in downtown Bangladesh
can make chicken potato curry in his sleep in about a third of the time it
took me. But, let said Bangladeshi have
a go at Mom Decker’s spaghetti – that’s homemade sauce bucko so get that sick rag-goo
bottled poison out of yer head! I’m
thinking I’ve got the upper hand on that one.
Not bragging. It’s down to an art
that takes less than an hour.
If at first you don’t succeed – quit. Something like that? Been there, done that, wish I hadn’t (quit,
that is). I like music – can’t read a
note, but I like music. Tried learning
how to read music once or twicet, but that’s like hard to learn for my
right-brained self. Never followed up on the efforts. So here I am, bereft
and vacant and without what I’ll call a technical understanding of something I
greatly enjoy and appreciate.
I also posit that we are too used to seeing the final,
finished, and polished result done at the hands of highly paid professionals. Consider the McDonald’s customer-facing menu,
replete with deceptive photos of what the food ‘looks like’, organized by this
or that or the other thing. Oft
overlooked, it is the product of hundreds of man-hours of people in
putty-colored meeting rooms, design offices, and printing shops. We don’t see the ugliness that goes in to
designing even the mendacity of advertising, let alone the well-done and more
beautiful displays.
Yeah, there’s a fear of failure. There’s a fear that what I’m attempting is
going to suck and suck bad. Anyone who has ever written anything for public consumption knows this feeling well. And guess what, it has sucked,
it does suck, and it shall suck again. Can I
get a big true-that!? But you don’t get
good at something by doing it one time.
And guess what, sucking bad didn’t end my world. It never ended yours – unless you’re talking
about a poisoned blow-dart down your throat like that aborigine in that one
Bugs Bunny episode. Different kind of
sucking altogether.
So – learn the lessons and wear the scars proudly into the
future. It simply means you tried and in
a world of people who attempt less than what they are comfortable with, that
means a lot.
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