Chemistry & the Art of Cooking

Often people kind of assume that I'm some great cook or that I was just born knowing how.

That is soooo not true!  And, even now I'm no expert chef.

When I think back to my first experiences with cooking I always smile because what I know now was very much hard won.

Let me recount one of my memories from my twenties...

It was eighteen and a half years ago or so.  I was newly engaged to my beautiful husband and meeting my in-laws to be for the first time.

We traveled to Arkansas where my sister-in-law and her husband were living at the time.

I remember sitting in the front room of my sister-in-law's house, glued to Mark's side, feeling oh so nervous wondering what his family would be like and "Would they like me?  Will I like them?"

At that time I wanted nothing more than to stay close to Mark as I was in unfamiliar territory.

Then I hear my husband's step mother say "Come on in the kitchen.  You can help prepare dinner"

I remember sitting in stunned shock and thinking "what do I do?  Oh my gosh, I don't know how to cook!"

So I go in the kitchen and stand there with a lost look on my face saying "what should I do?"

My sister-in-law quickly assessed the blank expression on my face and they suggested I just chop vegetables.

I walked over to the cutting board and looked at the knife and the vegetables and gulped.

"How exactly do I do that?  I'm not really sure how to chop vegetables" I whispered nervously.

Now it was their turn to sport that blank look.

I'm sure they were thinking "Is she kidding?  Who doesn't know how to chop vegetables?"

More likely they were probably thinking Mark was going to starve to death if he married me.

Needless to say I survived that experience and it gave me a newfound sense of purpose to learn how to cook.

To bolster my confidence as I stepped forth into the unknown I told myself "Carrie, cooking is basically chemistry.  If you can do chemistry you can cook".

And, I have done chemistry.  Chemistry was one of my minors in college.  And of all the chemistry classes I've taken none were as harrowing as organic chemistry.

The lab class was done in microscale(think really small).  Part of our grade for each experiment was in obtaining an end product.

It was not uncommon to find my lab instructor standing next to me at the end of class staring at the glass jar that was to contain my product and saying "It looks like filter paper".

"What?"  I'd say innocently, "See if you look really hard it's right there".  He'd lift the jar up to the light and squint, looking at me like I was crazy and about half of those times he'd take pity on me and I'd get the credit.

You see when you're working on microscale there isn't much room to screw up.  Everything has to be very exact.  Often at the end I would have a product but then we'd have to use some of that to then test it's melting point etc in capillary tubes.

It's just that after that final testing to verify the identity of the product I wouldn't always have anything left.

Sometimes during the last step I'd be standing there at the Buchner funnel furiously scraping any product off of the filter paper into my glass jar praying for enough product to get the grade.

So when he said it looked like filter paper it probably was!

Thank heavens I can laugh about that now.

So this long story short is that I finally just started cooking.  Like all things it just takes practicing and a whole lot of screwing it up.

The really great thing is that it's a lot like anything else- once you practice and have the mechanics down then you can really start enjoying it and getting more artistic with it, experimenting with new twists on old ideas and generally putting your soul into it.

It can become be an expression of who you are just like when a violinist plays a piece from her heart and soul it becomes new in the playing of it.  She puts her own mark on it, plays it in her own way that only she can and it's beautiful and new and different.  The audience can feel it and in the end we're all Blessed in the basking of it.

That's why I love to cook now.  It's one of the ways I find to express myself and my Light.

No one is born already knowing how to do everything.  We all have to practice and make mistakes and learn.

It's those of us who persevere through the adversity and take it to the next level, the level of the heart, that really make the difference.

Those are the people who change the world.  Whether anyone else is aware of it or not they do, they change the world.

Let's be those people!

Have a beautiful day friends. :)

Carrie