Last night I had a bit of a cooking disaster. I got home a bit earlier than normal and—needing to use up some vegies—thought I’d make a lovely potato soup.
I’ve made soup many times but never the same soup twice! I’m not much of a recipe guy. I learned the basics of cooking from my mum and usually just throw a few things together and it works (incidentally this is why I don’t like baking! The recipe following is too precise). My rustic techniques have never steered me wrong before. As the primary cook for our household, I can usually throw together a meal that will keep the wolves from the door—even if it seems there isn’t much in the house to eat.
This was the first time in almost 13 years of marriage that I have cooked something for my wife and I that ended so disastrously. We ended up having eggs and mushrooms on toast instead.
What went wrong?
Before I tell you, apparently, I made a cardinal mistake that everyone knows (except me). When I shared the story with some colleagues at work, they all seemed to know that what had happened to me, was bound to happen. So no doubt you’ll roll your eyes or have a little laugh. That’s okay. I forgive you! I think enough time has passed that I can laugh at myself too!
Now back to the soup.
Tired of dinner prep taking too long and trying to get dinner ready early so we could eat as soon as the kids arrived home from day care, I tried to hack the system. I had a foolproof plan to expedite the process. I wanted a creamy soup and usually this involves cooking everything up in stock and then blending it down to a creamy consistency. The problem is, without a whizz bang device, this always involves (with the tools I had at my disposal) cooking then cooling the soup before blending. I didn’t have time so I came up with my fool-proof plan. I’d blend the vegies—potato, cauliflower, carrot, garlic, onion—and then cook them.
The resulting mixture just wouldn’t cook. The resulting bile tasted exactly how you’d expect raw onion and potato to taste but warm and gritty.
I learned a few lessons that night about my life and my faith.
Quicker isn’t always better: In this day and age, we love to take short cuts. We want things to happen quickly and conveniently. If something doesn’t happen instantly we become frustrated and impatient. Sometimes there is value in the process. Things are done in a certain way because it’s tried and tested. I’d love a relationship with God that is instant and easy but sometimes the slow, tested methods are the best. I try to fit God into my leftover time without doing the slow and steady work of walking with Him every moment.
A good base: If you don’t have the right foundation, you can’t necessarily fix the taste. I tried adding salt, sugar other spices. Nothing much worked but I was expending energy and resources that could not be recuperated. The soup could have continued to grow, while I continued to try to fix it, but it was all wasted at the end because it was where I started that was the issue.
All the right ingredients can still taste wrong: This one is interesting. The soup was probably still edible, but it tasted terrible. Everything I used was healthy. If one had forced themselves to eat it, they may have had nutritional benefit. They certainly wouldn’t have starved. But there was no joy in the way the ingredients were presented, no finesse in the technique that made them accessible to others. And so, the soup remained on the stove, uneaten. (I was hoping time would cook everything more and make it palatable but alas, this was not the case). The pearl was only fit for the pigs.
Okay, okay, metaphors only go so far, so I’ll try not to make the soup things stretch beyond their usefulness. They who have ears, let them hear.
