I took Home
Ec. in middle school and learned the basics of following a recipe. I knew how to use measuring cups, how to boil
water; I could crack eggs, flip pancakes, and whip up a mean batch of Hamburger
Helper, by the time I headed to college.
But I hated cooking. Along with
various other forms of housekeeping, cooking was a chore I’d felt strapped with
as a teenager, and I took no joy in turning raw ingredients into meals. In fact, I survived college eating at the
cafeteria, or whipping up microwave food, splurging occasionally on spaghetti,
and feeding on snack foods throughout the day.
When I
landed in Villach, Austria, after college, and hit the Spar store for rations the
first time, I was shocked. I felt like
Ma Ingalls shopping at the general store.
The boxed dinners I had counted on were nowhere to be
found. Meat had to be requested by the
cut, from the butcher; I didn't know what any of the cuts were called in English, let alone German. The small rows of
shelves were full of raw ingredients – flour, oil, starch. The produce was locally grown, making small, pathetic
piles compared to the enormous, shiny fruits and vegetables I was used to
picking up at the store back in the U.S.
Even the eggs appeared to have been pulled out from under a chicken just
that morning – sometimes feathers or bedding were still stuck to them.
I struggled
to feed myself for the first couple months I lived in Villach. I ate spaghetti three times a week. Cereal and yogurt were daily staples. A fellow teaching assistant turned me on to
Brie cheese on zwieback toast, and I probably ate that twice a day. I was walking several miles each day, back
and forth to work and everywhere else I needed to go, so my pathetic cooking
caught up with me. I was hungry all the
time.
Then my
little sister bought a plane ticket and joined me in Villach. While I’d been off at college, getting
educated, she’d been developing her life skills in the school of hard
knocks. I thought, when she asked if she
could come to Europe with me for a few months, that it was going to help her
break out of her stagnation; I thought I was going to help open her eyes to the
bigger possibilities in life and we were going to have a blast, touring the
continent and spending time together.
What I never imagined, was that my sister – still a kid in my eyes – was
going to head into that ill-equipped Spar store with me, and walk down the
aisles putting spices and ingredients into our basket with a deft confidence
that made my jaw drop.
That was
before we even hit the kitchen. It was there
that I truly became her student. She
would grab a few staples and start opening the spice jars to give them a sniff
before adding a bit of one thing, or more of something else. She chopped vegetables and minced garlic. As
she worked in the kitchen, I just watched her and learned. She wasn’t afraid. She didn’t need a recipe, and she wasn’t
worried whether every dish turned out Betty-Crocker-perfect. She just used her imagination to build a dish
in her head, what the flavors would taste like together, how long to keep it on
the heat to get it crisp, when to add salt and when to leave it out. Of course, there was no pressure on the outcome:
I was starving and thrilled to eat something besides zwieback. What I got, though, were delicious meals, and
a new attitude. It was fun to cook with
my sister. And after she left, and
later, once I’d come back to the U.S., it was fun to cook on my own.
I learned so
much from watching my sister cook. The kitchen is no longer a chemistry lab,
upon which I expect to be graded.
Instead it is an art studio. There
is now such a joy for me in experimenting with ingredients and techniques. I see the cookbook as a guidebook, instead of
a manual, and love looking over a list of ingredients and imagining the
flavors, building the dish in my head and tweaking it to fit the groceries I
have in my cupboards, or the preferences of who I am cooking for. Sometimes everything turns out fantastic, and
my kids rave about how much better my meatloaf is than the restaurant
stuff. Sometimes it doesn’t go as well,
and we serve our dinner with lots of ketchup and barbeque sauce.
But the most
important thing is that my kitchen has become a place of love and joy. I enjoy making the menu and buying the food, I
love to sit around the table with my beloved family and see them nourished by
what I have prepared for them. I think
my sister got a lot out of her visit to Austria – but more than that, I still treasure the
lessons I learned from her.
Anyone too lazy to cook will starve, but a
hard worker is a valuable treasure. Proverbs 12:27
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