lessons from the kitchen

It’s the hunger for perfection that gets to me (pun unintended).

Making good food is a pursuit of the ideal – the chance to create something that will delight palettes, “melt in your mouth”, and excite the soul. There are so many parallels that can be drawn between the act of cooking and living a meaningful existence…so much can be learned from what a great chef does: cooking is about willpower, tenacity, making the right decisions at the right time, and a keen sense of discernment.

I find baking to be particularly precarious. Baking is all about precision, measurement, and control – things that I sadly am not gifted at. I’m good at being creative and have pretty good natural instinct…but asking me to be precise? That’s tough. The technique required for excellent baking comes down to discipline: are you willing to take that extra minute to verify that you’ve measured correctly? Do you know exactly when to stop in order to prevent the dough from being overworked? Are you fast enough…and have you paid special attention to the temperature of your ingredients?

These are hard lessons to learn…baking teaches me to be patient and to hold out for the reward rather than living off the instant satisfaction. One of the things that brings me great joy is to bake a pie from scratch, lovingly involved in every part of its life, and seeing its golden brown beauty gleam from the oven as it is ready to come out. If only all of life’s lessons came with pies included=)