What's Cooking? Consequences!

Until I was well into my 30's, did I learn to start to cook. Until then, in my adult life, I had pretty much subsisted on oatmeal, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the school lunch where I work, and spaghetti, with the occasional eggs over the weekend. I took the obligatory vitamin to cover the bases. Oh yeah, I could make toast also.

In preparation for Y2K, I had stocked-piled about 30 canisters of oats, which to my credit, I ate every last bite of, several years past the expiration dates. The Indians saved our bacon regarding Y2K. We were closer to a meltdown than we thought. They still knew the older programming coding and were willing  to work cheap. A transatlantic cable allowing a lot of data to flow between our two countries had been connected a couple of years before. A close call. With the oatmeal, I envisioned myself as some neighborhood Joseph, parceling out the grains to emaciated and grateful neighbors, me becoming mayor of Columbia or something in the end.  "What was meant to be evil has turned out to be good because God was in it" type of deal.

I remember the day that it changed with my cooking. I was hanging out with a mentor/friend at breakfast and he mentioned how much he loved to make and eat fried oysters. It was right before Christmas. So, we headed down to the Eastern Market in York and bought some raw oysters. I picked up some breadcrumbs at the grocery store and went some an fried them up in some oil. It was delicious, it was delightful. It was greasy. I recall being so nervous making the dish, it was almost like having sex for the first time.

Since then I have become very adept at making dishes. I am no sophisticate but have figured out that a lot of the ethnic tastes that I enjoy are fairly simple to make technique-wise as long as I have the right ingredients. So Tex-Mex, Chinese, Thai, and Indian, are all within my purview. I also make a smattering of other dishes and am not afraid to try something new. Since I am not terribly mechanically-inclined and thus will not necessarily master much in that arena (although I have improved quite a bit in that arena, too), cooking has become a primary life priming station for lessons; it has taught me a lot about being concrete and using common sense. And consequences.

Yesterday, I decided to make some Pyrex Pizza (kind of like deep dish but just in a Pyrex pan). Well, because I had not applied enough oil before spreading out the dough that I had made and risen, the dough stuck like mortar to the glass of the pan. I had messed up. Should have used butter. I find butter to be the best for cooking almost anything and to keep food from sticking to the cooking surfaces. No Teflon pan needed. Just a skillet or other cooking utensil, a slab of melted butter, and no stick at a very high percentage.

The clean-up of the Pyrex pan entailed first, a serious soaking in water. Water is a great solvent because a big reason why something sticks is the lack of H2O. It reminds me of how tears are also a solvent of sorts, breaking up the hard hearts that we have. Some tears of course are more the result of the consequences that follow versus a true sorrow for who we have hurt. Consequences are an important teacher, though. In our digital age where devices have engineered out the dumbness of our actions (like getting lost), we lose a lot of learning.

Kids do actions in video games which would hurt and maim in real life. So, virtual reality winds up becoming a liar. Jump your bike off of a roof and crash, you may not get the opportunity to do that again because you kill or paralyze yourself, or at least break some bones. Pick up a hot frying pan and burn your hand, you'll learn to respect heat. Punch another in the face, you might just get kicked in the groin. Real life, real consequences.  Our labor is no longer connected to the physical world...we have outsourced it to machines and to places that treat people like machines.

Back to the Pyrex pan. I had to figure out what tool would be best to scrape off the baked on dough. After loosening it up with the soaking in suds, the pizza cutter, that rounded wheel with a sharp edge, proved to be ideal. Unlike the spatula that bent with force, possibly snapping it, the pizza cutter was able to be wielded like a a rounded chisel, separating the baked on dough from the glass surface quite adeptly. The roundness of the wheel allowed me to get into the curvilinear sides of the pan. 95% of the Pyrex pan was clean and I sponged off the rest easily. It found it somewhat interesting that the same pizza cutting tool that I would have used for a successful pizza making experience was the same tool for a failure.

Here are the Takeaways:

- Connect yourself to the physical world; it will teach you much about life itself. Exercise, Painting, Cooking, Sewing, Knitting, Sports, Repairs, etc. Consequences, good or ill, will come, just as sun shines and rain falls. Cause and Effect is reinforced not mainly through words but pleasure versus pain. Don't short-circuit the process or live your life through a screen.  Failure is a feedback for learning as long as you don't give up on worthy things. "Who said life is easy?" as parents have told their kids for eons.  

- The same tools that you use for success will also allow you to address and fix failure. If you have negative and sinful issues with alcohol, sex, eating, money, etc., the solution for most of us is learning to be godly in their employment versus abstinence. Some people in some circumstances and personality characteristics must avoid certain things period. For the rest of us, God expects us to grow up and be mature. St. Augustine said something to the effect, "Abstinence is easy. Moderation is difficult."  So, the Lothario Playboy who seduces women, has sex, and then moves on to another bed conquest, needs to stop and stay put, get married, have sex within the confines of marriage, and be a man rather than a screwing machine, devoid of responsibility and relationships. And deal with the dysfunctions of the day-to-day rather than scampering away like an alley cat.

- There is Ignorance and Then There Is Sin - Much of what we do wrong is not necessarily immoral. It can still have devastating effects but it is not as simple as saying everything harmful is sinful. Diving into a swimming pool and hitting your head on the bottom is not immoral per se. It hurts and perhaps does great harm but it is not necessarily the result of sin. Sin is typical moral in nature. It can have a practical side. Ignorance is just a lack of knowledge and wisdom and not a heart issue by definition and implication. The Catholic Bible states Psalm 24 well (remember that the "Catholic" Bible and the "Protestant" Bible number the Psalms differently). "Do not remember the offenses of my youth AND my ignorances (Psalm 24 in the Catholic Bible).

I love how it points out the difference. In an ironies of ironies, me as a Reformed Presbyterian Anti-Catholic in theology Christian, am finding great comfort in the Catholic translation of the Psalms. For whatever reason, the words just ring truer to me and the Spirit moves in them more. I have not quite figured out why because I generally like the King James a lot. Speaking of the King James type of language, I am 65% finished reading Moby Dick. I read it every day on my Kindle app on my iPhone which I suppose does illustrates the upside of technology in general and the value of consistency personally.

Final Thought:  MEDIABISTRO, a high-end New York City based media outlet and organization is publishing my "Pitch Your Niche" essay which is a brief  piece where I explain that the key to getting published is Proficiency (know and love your subject, as well as the craft of writing itself), Personality (let your individuality shine), and Purpose (connect your view of the world to something beyond you, to universals that others can relate to). I don't quite alliterate the three P's in the essay but do promote the idea of what is your Unique Writing Proposition? (UWP) with those three P's in mind. I dig that I am not only getting published in the Christian pub world (which is still cool).

My last two essays have found their landing space in secular spots (Coffee Lovers Magazine and MEDIABISTRO). I had to say "NO" to a lot of worthy activities in order to work on my writing. I didn't apologize for being focused and that focus is paying dividends. We have to decide what we are going to concentrate on...to be everywhere is to be nowhere, as it is said. I didn't expect others to always understand and they didn't to one degree or another.

I don't owe others an explanation. I sensed it was what God wanted me to do and "Wisdom is justified by her children." (I think KJV).