More Cooking

Yesterday I wrote about following recipes and having all the ingredients. I expressed the need to have a recipe and just as important, to have all the ingredients before beginning. I also talked about my experience with improvising and although exciting in the moment, I failed to either duplicate a great recipe or created some dish I never wanted to taste again. After acquiring your recipe and all its ingredients, it’s almost time to start cooking.

For as long as I can remember, my Mom handled things in the kitchen. From cooking to cleaning, she ruled her domain. One of the things she would often say about cooking is “Clean as you go.” I mentioned yesterday how I enjoy cooking, but not cleaning. Seems to take the joy out of something I really enjoy. But that’s a lesson for another day, today we’ll discuss the meal itself.

Having a recipe and all the ingredients doesn’t mean we get to start eating right away. Heck, we don’t even get to start cutting until we’ve done a bit of prep work. Prep meaning preparation or preparing meaning it’s now time to clean our cooking area, measure our ingredients according to the recipe, and make sure everything is ready to go and in place for the masterpiece we’re about to prepare.

If, for example, we’re preparing a chocolate cake, we’d need flour, butter, chocolate, amongst other things. We’d also need a mixing pan, a spatula at a minimum, something to grease our cooking pan so the cake doesn’t stick, and we’d need to preheat our oven. Having a recipe, a formula, doesn’t insure our success. There’s still work that has to be completed before we actually begin.

Once we’ve measured and mixed our flour, butter, chocolate, and other ingredients, we’ll transfer them from our mixing bowl and into our cooking pan. Afterwards we’ll place that in our preheated oven and finally set the timer. Notice, we’ve put in a bunch of work and we still haven’t eaten. What’s worse for me and maybe not for you, is waiting. Now that we’ve put in all the work, it’s in the oven, our cake isn’t ready to eat. We still have to wait.

If our recipe says cook at a certain degree for 30 minutes and we remove the cake at 20 minutes, we’ll know the cake isn’t ready. If we let the cake cook for 40 or 45 minutes, we didn’t follow our recipe, it’s dried out, not as moist, and not even close to what we’d anticipated. But, if we remove it 30 minutes, we still can’t dig in and take a hearty slice. We must let the cake rest. We must let the cake settle and cool down a bit before we enjoy the fruits of our labor. The same is true with life.

If our meal is to retire as a multimillionaire at age 65, there are some ingredients we need to fill this recipe. First we’ll need a career, white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter. We’ll need some sort of valuable skill we can exchange for money. In this instance let’s say we’re a mechanic. We start by going to a trade school that teaches us the ins and out of our industry. We acquire the tools, metaphorical and literal, place them in our toolbox and get to work cooking.

Next, we’ll need a way to set aside our excess money. The excess we have needs to grow over the time we’ll work in our caree

This is the first part of the entry.