Finding My Inner Julia Child

For many years, I thought I hated to cook. It turns out I was wrong! What I hate is following a recipe, measuring things, planning ahead, and cleaning up. Oh and on principle, I hate anything that requires my complete attention for longer than 20 minutes. I’m also not too keen on cooking for myself. Other than this---why, I love to cook!

For a long time now I’ve combined my love of cooking with my love of books and I collect all manner of cookbooks and recipe collections (you know, the little booklets they put by the cashier in the grocery store). Of course, this collecting began before I realized that I liked cooking, so many of these are still in boxes somewhere, waiting for my fairy Godmother to hurry up and buy me Billy bookcases from Ikea. (My love of Ikea is even stronger than my love of cooking!)

Through the magic of DVR I record 30-Minute Meals and Semi-Homemade (both are Food Network shows). I follow two blogs that showcase daily recipes and I’m a registered member of allrecipes.com where I have a profile full of recipes I find particularly tempting. I love shopping for cool kitchen gadgets and excitedly drool over such things as sifters, whisks, silicone tools, and serving dishes.

Considering all this, it’s amazing that such little actual cooking takes place! Let’s see… for Christmas I made cookies and cream fudge for David (I’ll go ahead and claim credit for that), but my contribution to Andrew’s magnificent Thanksgiving meal was water! And I was late getting there! (Why do my friends put up with me?)

Every week when I put out nothing but store-bought goodies for Sabbath School brunch, I promise myself that I’ll cook something the following week. The sad thing is that I believe this recurring lie! I think the last time I got excited about cooking was when I used to make breakfast for the praise team---hmm…maybe there’s some hidden meaning there!

Cognitive dissonance, I learned at AUC, is the fine art of holding two conflicting beliefs at the same time. In particular, it can apply to believing one thing and yet behaving in a contradictory manner. This theory goes on to argue that people cannot do this for very long; that there is an internal drive to resolve the dissonance by either altering the behavior or changing or rationalizing the beliefs. Very soon, this theory predicts, I will either return to the idea that I hate cooking, continue to make excuses, or actually start cooking.

Isn’t the suspense just killing you?