Cooking 101

At what price do we declare it’s too costly to follow the pathways others set for us?

When we’ve lost ourselves to the dreams and schemes of others, how long will it take to gain our own lives back? How much of the little time we have in this life will have been wasted before we realize we are who we know we are and not who others want us to be?

Last week Ben was making a sort of quiche and we wanted a crust under it (I was the one who mentioned it, but my main motive was that it takes a lot of elbow grease to clean egg dishes out of the pan). Ben thought it would be a good idea to make a crepe for the crust so he picked up Julia’s book, found the recipes for crepes and spent, oh, maybe a couple of minutes looking through them. Then he whipped up the recipe in the blender and made an incredible quiche.

The next day he whipped up another crepe for an apple dumpling kind of thing . . . without even looking at the recipe again. And again it was excellent.  

But it wasn’t soufflé.

So. Tomorrow I’m going to try another soufflé. I’m not sure what it will be, yet. Maybe a spinach soufflé. But I’ll have to study the recipe again, since the last two weren’t so successful . . .

My cooking 101 lesson for this week, then, was humility. How am I doing?

 

The aspens in the mountain are turning gold. Yesterday Ben and I went hiking with Lori and Dawn. It wasn’t a particularly nice day, because of wind, but we found a beautiful grove and lay on the ground watching the leaves quake and the clouds flying by. The breaking sunlight flashed brilliant on the gold leaves, then was doused again as another cloud soared beneath the sun. The sky was an intense blue contrasted by the billowing white; together they bounced the brilliant yellow of the aspens and the deep green of the pines on a reverberatory canvas of my memory. We stayed beneath the aspens far longer than Ben and I had planned and, so, didn’t get our main chore for the day done – namely, butchering the old hens. We were bothered only because now that chore is once again set into the future as an undone task.

 

 

Our favorite fall hiking area takes us past this little cabin: our grand and elusive fantasy home.