Now to REALLY Get Things Started......

During last week, we had a snow day!  Immediately I began to fantasize about all the time I would have to cook real, delicious vegetarian dishes and blog about the undoubtedly enlightening experience!  My day however went slightly otherwise and not at all according to plan:

Prepackaged oatmeal (as usual), followed by takeout after doing laundry, red velvet cupcakes from a box to thank the dude who had to help us get the car in the garage due to the snowpocalypse, equally boxed muffins and hot chocolate, packaged chickpeas curry….YIKES!! 

What happened to making a point of cooking???  There is an interesting quote from the short story “Rawalpindi 1919” by Shauna Singh Baldwin where the Indian narrator muses that the English “use sharp forks and long knives […] to keep themselves distant from their food.”  I found it intriguing how a person from the Indian culture might see using utensils such as forks and knives to be distancing, especially since, being an American of European ancestry, utensils are all I know to use.

However, this quote struck me in that I thought of how many other ways a person could feel distant from what they eat.  For example, I feel very distant from it now due to the fact that I am not really making it!  What I have prepared lately may as well be labeled “heat and eat” as far as directions are concerned.

These thoughts were equally encouraged by the film Eat, Pray, Love, which I watched during the snowpocalypse.  The visual and auditory up-close imagery of meals being prepared made me want to experience that sensory experience for myself.  I believe that if I incorporate positive energy into what I am making, the dish will become not only nourishing, but rewarding too, and even therapeutic.

So.  On the whole, my first attempts at a new cooking lifestyle have been en epic fail.  But I am not discouraged!!  This defeat only makes me even more encouraged to succeed.

New plan: setting clear goals to encourage success.  I will start small so as not to become overwhelmed; two completely homemade dishes a week.  (Well, close to completely homemade….I mean, I won’t be pressing almonds for their milk or growing blueberries…but you get the idea).

For this coming week, I plan to pick two meals (from the various vegetarian cookbooks I have yet to break in with sauce splatters and sticky pages) and modify my grocery lists to include more of the good, natural stuff and less of the bad, fake stuff.

Note to self: completing this feat may require finishing homework assignments EXTRA early, to compensate for possible recipe failure……it has happened before!