relaxing

I learned something on Friday while making dinner. Making a filling dinner for a family of seven can be rather tiring. I told my mom happily that I would do it, because I wanted to cook...a homemade meal is so much more awesome than the take-home you find in a supermarket or fast-food delivery or something. Which is what I heard my mother say we were going to have that night (Friday is the laid-back night; everyone's tired). Thus my offer to make dinner. I was all too ready to set out to save my family from finishing off the week with an anticlimactic tasteless, untasteful meal.

I energetically pulled several cookbooks off the shelves to look for ideas. To me cooking is an adventure. I hate making the same thing too often. It's always a chance to try something new.

But my energy pretty much fizzled out when I opened the freezer and found only ground beef and beef shanks. I can eat vegetarian but it is hard to cook a satisfying vegetarian meal for a family of non-vegetarians. Here I wish to readily admit my perfectionistic tendencies. I could have made beef soup...a really yummy one...but I don't like soup in hot weather. I could have made spaghetti or some variation of it...but we had already had spaghetti the night before.

Here I came to a crossroads, and I started to panic. I felt like telling my mom there wasn't enough in the fridge and could she please just order dinner. One half of my mind said, "Tell her...this is a good time; dad can buy it in since he's still on his way home...tell her before you start and get yourself into the mess of a half-accomplished Friday dinner..." And the other half said, "But take-out is DULL. Remember those highly unpalatable meats...and roast chicken we had last time...anything you make, even a simple something, will be better than that!"

So right then I made a decision. Rather than panicking and stressing my way through the cooking, I would do it slowly. Meals don't materialize; they are produced through a series of small steps. I would relax and cook my way through that series of small steps, rather than waste a lot of energy stressing while I was cooking. After all, cooking is a good way to occupy my time, with many more fruits to show than idleness...or just doing random stuff. Why not just cook and keep at it and slowly but surely move closer to the goal. I would do my best with whatever we had and it would be an adventure anyhow.

This is the crux of the story - my decision to relax my way through the task, rather than stress my way through the task. This is so significant to me I feel like emboldening that last sentence. I do this with so many things in life - besides the healthy amount of stress needed to accomplish any task, big or small, I also stress and stress and stress and have nothing to show for the extra stress except a lot of wasted energy and often panic. So this is a realization I plan to apply to a lot of other things in life. Really if I could relax and enjoy rather than stress and panic life would be so much more of a fun ride, lol.

There is a happy ending to the Friday night dinner story. I decided I could make the savory rice recipe I'd found in a cookbook, substituting a couple ingredients to make up for what we didn't have. I made a carrot-radish-green pepper-onion-baby corn-shallot stir-fry. And when my dad called and I overheard my mom asking him to pick up a couple of grocery items I asked for some chicken fillets too; I could make those last when they got home.

The savory rice/radish stir-fry/chicken fillets in cream gravy was a success and a warm memory. And the leftovers were all eaten up over the next two days, ever last bit. And if I'd given in to stress at that moment Friday evening we'd have had to settle for an impersonal ill-seasoned take-out meal made by who knows from our nearest grocery store.