My Month of Gourmet In Review- 2/28/09

When I began the project of making all the recipes in the February 2009 Gourmet magazine, I knew what I wanted to do. Now at the end of the month and with the project successfully completed, I can better answer why I did it and what I learned.
First, I love being a stay at home mom. I get to spend every moment with my daughter, watch all her steps, hear all her words, and savor the all the messes she makes (See right). But I do miss the daily purpose that teaching gave to my life. I had a goal each day, a lesson to teach, a concept to help children understand. Being a parent has some of those same ideas but they are often less concrete and rarely accomplished in a day, a month, or a year. I missed the sense of daily accomplishment that starting and finishing a task provided. This month of Gourmet project allowed me to see daily purpose and accomplishment. I had a goal, a goal that matched well with, and did not take time from, my job as a mom. I could spend time each day reaching the goal of the recipes for that day and all the days working toward my goal of completing the recipes in the month. I need purpose and this project gave me that.
Some may ask me if I do not find enough purpose in raising my child. Please don't misunderstand me, that holds the ultimate purpose in my mind. But it is difficult and often flawed to find one's purpose solely in that of another human being. What I may want from my daughter will soon enough clash with what she wants for herself and if I only find purpose in her, I will be vastly disappointed when she chooses another way. Even a goal as simple as making all the recipes in a cooking magazine allows me to do to something completely independent of my role as a parent.
I also enjoy writing. Like most people, I did more writing in college than I have done at any other point in my life. My grades showed that I was not a particularly good writer but my childhood diaries show that writing has always been an effective outlet for my creativity. Playing with Eyrleigh is at a pretty rudimentary level of creativity and writing about my cooking allows me to be creative at an adult level. I have noticed in reading my posts from the beginning that in the course of just a month, I am writing more comfortably and with more creativity each time I blog. I know I will never be too old to learn and writing helps me do that.

That I enjoy cooking is perhaps an obvious statement at this point, but it is true. I like to see what happens when you put ingredients together. My favorite recipe of this entire month was the Gumbo Ya-Ya on page 32. This recipe epitomized what I love about cooking. First, I love the chemistry of how simple butter and flour can be stirred and heated to make a wonderfully dark, rich roux that makes a soup define a culture. I love the way that the word "gumbo" evokes a picture of a place and the fact that the flavor of gumbo can do the same thing, no matter where in the world you are. I love the fact that having a particular food on a particular day, like gumbo on Fat Tuesday, ties me in my little quiet house in Lawrenceville, Georgia, U.S.A., to celebrations in cities across the globe.
So, if I found purpose, was creative, and did something I loved this month, what did I learn? I learned a lot. I learned that yeast continues to intimidate me but I will keep trying to get it right. I learned that though I like soup, I am very particular. And I learned that success and failure need not be mutually exclusive. I succeeded in making all the recipes in the Gourmet magazine this month but I failed at always making something I will enjoy. My least favorite recipe of the month demonstrates what I mean. One look at my picture of the Borscht Horseradish Terrine on page 74 shows that something failed in the making of this recipe. My gelatin collapsed immediately when I removed the terrine from its container. In my picture, you can see the terrine looks nothing like the magazine photo on page 75. But the failure of the recipe was not just in the gelatin. I could not change the expectation of my senses that the flavor of the terrine would be sweet, not savory. The texture I felt in my mouth could not reckon with the flavor I tasted. It would take a long time, maybe a lifetime, to succeed at changing that. Did I fail then in making the recipe? No, the failure was in execution and expectation, not in the making of the recipe, for make it I did. That one and 51 others! What fun!