April 16, 2023 “Throw out the recipe!”
I am not a person that enjoys cooking, however I love eating and eating healthy. I’ve convinced myself that the kitchen and how we approach cooking, ingredients and recipes can be the perfect metaphor for life as we navigate this fitness journey. By understanding the relationship between these two, I’m able to see life in a way that makes a lot more sense. Sometimes we ask questions, seeking answers that are hard to find, hard to make sense of. However, this helps me, I hope it will do the same for you.
When I do decide to cook I call my sister who is a chef and has loved cooking my entire life. I call her because she doesn’t have me write down a recipe. As we facetime each other she has me open up my pantry or fridge and she has me add this and that, no specific amount, because she cooks from her heart. By the time I am finished cooking the food is delicious and even if I have made the dish before it tastes different each time because of the different ingredients added.
If you follow a recipe, you know exactly what you’re having for dinner. If instead, you let the recipe serve as a guide, you’re much more likely to end up with something different. Different can mean bad and inedible, in which case, I hope you learn from your mistakes. However, if different means exciting and undiscovered flavors you didn’t know existed, you then realize that it can be a lot more fun to blaze your own trail, to draw outside the lines, trust your instincts, and give it a go, even if you’re unsure of how things might turn out in the end. More often than not for me, taking the risk has been worth it, it’s never catastrophic and there’s always a lesson to be learned from failure. Risk taking has allowed me to learn something about the world and the way it works, instead of just following the directions based on what people think we should do.
There is a Lot to be Said for Being Creative… In Not Playing it Safe. I love a good meal that becomes an adventure, I love stepping out of my comfort zone in order to create an experience with my meal. It’s admirable, but it also takes practice, and above that, courage to try techniques we might not have mastered yet, or choosing to work with flavors with which we might not be entirely familiar. It takes courage, because in this process we are without a doubt, going to fail along the way. It might take a few tries to master breaking down a fish if you have never done so. It might take overcooking a few meals before getting things down pat, but through all of this, you open yourself up to the opportunity to learn something new. It’s not only a new way to prepare something, or even a new dish, you now have knowledge and experience to share with other people, giving them the opportunity to learn and grow from you. The more you try, the more you screw up, but in the end, the more you learn, and along with that are some darn good stories to tell.
Low and Slow— There are ways to try to hack the system, however at the end of the day, it just doesn’t turn out quite the same. Things take time, so let’s appreciate the process we take in getting there— relationships take time, building sustainable businesses takes time, and losing weight (the right way) with diet and exercise takes time. You can try to find a path that gets you there faster, though along the way, you are bound to skip over some key steps— it’s just not the same. Life takes time.
It’s Not the Final Dish, but Rather What We Learn in Getting There— In cooking, as in life, we rush through things so often just trying to get to a certain place, that along the way, we forget to look around and notice the things that happen between the beginning and the end— what we’ve learned about the dish, how we could have adjusted things along the way, we miss those opportunities for growth. There is so much valuable information to learn from that we often just skip right over, not realizing it’s right underneath our noses. We follow a recipe, because that’s what a cookbook tells us to do. But, is it so much more interesting to learn things along the way, discover what works, what doesn’t and take what we’ve learned and pass it on to those who might benefit from it. That’s life. Often, we’re all chasing success and some end goal so much that we don’t slow down enough to have fun, enjoy our lives and switch up the recipe in our lives, for ourselves, because we may need different ingredients. In cooking, as in life, we’ll get to the end, but how did we get there? Did we follow instructions every step of the way, or did we use the recipe to guide us, allowing us to season it in a way that represents who we are. How we get there says a lot about the race we’ve run.
Sometimes Your Dish Doesn’t Turn Out Right— Things happen in the kitchen, often. I’ve ruined my fair share of meals, fallen short of impressing guests, dates and frequently, even myself. That’s part of life. Things don’t always go as planned and we certainly don’t always get what we want. But, if you never had an inedible piece of fish, then you would never truly know what it meant to have one that was absolutely delicious. If you’d never tried running and being out of breath, you will never appreciate when you can finally run MY hill with ease. The less than desirable meals allow us to appreciate the ones we most enjoy, and the same phenomenon happens in life. It’s not always sunny outside, but if it was, it would get pretty damn boring. If we knew that we would never lose our loved ones, we wouldn’t appreciate them nearly as much. When life could have given us a little more, we have the perfect opportunity to reflect back on the things for which we have to be grateful. Throw out the recipes or only use them as a guide and see how much more enjoyable it is to live a NO MESS life!
