Bon Appétit!

How a cooking fiasco led to my conversion of heart...

Life is complicated. Sometimes it throws you a curve ball, and things can get pretty messy. The messier things got, the more downtrodden I became. Maybe it wasn’t visible on the outside, but inside, I was becoming a real Eeyore.

The longer you are Eeyore, the longer it takes to snap out of it. Let me tell you how cooking supper last night helped snap me out of it….

I’m a relatively new cook. I can follow directions pretty well. The meal usually tastes pretty good, but the preparation is laughable. There’s always some fiasco. This time I was making shepherd’s pie, a relatively low stress meal…for everyone but me. I made a mistake of epic proportion, and I hope you can commiserate with me. Do you see the package of meat pictured below?

…I forgot to thaw it. Yup…3 pounds of rock solid ground beef. Had it been any larger in size, I’m sure I could have used it as a baseball bat. So, I got to work. Giving it a bath. Sawing. Beating. I couldn’t even break it apart to put it in the microwave properly. Much to my chagrin, all you could see was this huge cylinder spinning (and getting stuck) in the microwave. Needless to say, I was not factoring in so much trial and error when I was calculating prep time.

We always ring a bell when the meal is ready. When the bell was not ringing, reinforcements started to trickle in. I can only imagine the scene. Bowls, knives, knocked over instant mashed potato flakes, carnage from my beefy baseball bat, and a very disheveled Sr. Marie Jose, whose veil actually fell off during the climax of the scene.

My Sisters quickly got to work, silently and charitably cleaning up a mess that didn’t seem possible to create in an hour and a half. We finally got the food on the table and enjoyed a very tasty meal, if I do say so myself. We laughed and had great conversations. …And then continued cleaning up the mess. (Yes, it was that bad).

While I was reflecting on my day as I prayed before I went to bed, I was filled with gratitude for my local community. And then, that’s when it hit me. I had been so consumed by self-pity that I couldn’t even remember the last time I even thought of the word gratitude! The rays of gratitude pierced through the darkness I had been experiencing and revealed all that I had to be grateful for during my “difficult time”. It does not erase pain or frustration, but, like night-vision goggles, it illuminates the gifts of love, time, listening, affection, community, etc. that can get lost in times of desolation.

So, thank you Lord, for using that beefy baseball bat to open my eyes to the love, support, and concern you have been gifting me with all along. Thank you Sisters, for being the first gift I saw when my eyes were opened.

As you can see, I’m not the best cook in the world, so this is the only cooking advice that I advise that you take from me: There’s one ingredient that can transform an entire meal, and that, my friends, is gratitude.