As I have hopefully convinced you this month, there are a number of things you can share with your child when you teach them how to cook. I learned most of those lessons before my 16th birthday. Sometimes the lessons I learned were intended but other times the lessons were happenstance.
Lucky Bread
One such case, where a lesson I learned was coincidental occurred at a time where my father decided he was going to make bread. One school day afternoon, my father came home with a plethora of bread mix and yeast packages. You would have thought that he was a professional bread maker. There were so many packs of bread mix and yeast stacked on the kitchen counter it was utterly ridiculous. I was almost certain that my father had purchased a bread factory somewhere and he was going to compete head to head with the makers of Wonder Bread.
Contrary to my entrepreneurial hopes for my father, the excess of bread mix and yeast were not purchased for economic reasons unless you consider spending money on stuff the family didn’t need or couldn’t afford fiscal responsibility. My father for some strange reason simply wanted to make bread. Apparently his need to make bread extended well beyond just making one loaf. On that afternoon, he made up his mind that he was going to make every type of bread known to mankind. Worse of all, my sister and I would have an up-close and personal, first-hand view.
We Were All Witnesses
What did my father know about making bread? Sure he could make salads, massage steaks and bake potatoes but those things were so very different from baking bread. Having a first row seat to what I expected to be a complete cooking catastrophe was not how I intended to spend my evening. Unfortunately, it was not like I had another choice.
Well whether I wanted to watch or not, my father insisted that my sister and I view his neophyte bread making adventure. So like two captives who were convinced that we would never have an opportunity to steal away on the Underground Railroad, we observed inattentively as my father attempted to make bread.
A Baking Mess
Talk about total and unmitigated disaster. I am not exaggerating either when I tell you that none of the loaves – zip, nada, none, zero – turned out as he had intended or looked remotely similar to the bread displayed on the packages.
Most of the loaves failed to rise. They looked and felt like bricks when they came out of the oven. Other loaves were fully baked on the outside and uncooked and doughy on the inside. Still other loaves tasted like anything other than what they were supposed to taste like. It was a fiasco. Up until that moment in my life, watching imperfect loaf after each defective loaf come out of the oven was the funniest debacle that I had ever seen.
The man who always wanted an audience to observe his “fantastic” kitchen feats and listen to him pontificate about how talented he was had just suffered not one humiliation but multiple humiliations. In the infamous words of LeBron James, “not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven…loafs of bread were ruined.
I have no doubt that this was one time that my father wishes that he had not held my sister and me captive. If there had been no witnesses, he could have just thrown the bread away and pretended like the Bread Bomb had never happened. Instead there were two initially unwilling witnesses who were suddenly ecstatic that they were present to watch his baking embarrassment. We both wanted to laugh. Well I’m absolutely sure I wanted to laugh but I chose not to suffer a fate that was supposed to be reserved for the bread – baking heat.
Foil Funeral
Instead my sister and I looked sympathetically as my father wrapped loaf after loaf of bread in aluminum foil. That moment took on the feeling of someone who was preparing his beloved loaves of bread for entombment – wrapping the loaves in aluminum foil as if the foil was some sort of ceremonial burial garb. Those loaves were indeed dead and no one and I do mean no one was going to be resurrecting them to be eaten…not one slice, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven.
That bread was awful when it came out of the oven and even worse after it cooled. It was not eaten. On the kitchen counter those loaves of bread sat. In those shiny aluminum foil caskets those loaves of bread decayed. They laid on the kitchen counter for what seemed like weeks or at least until they had molded sufficiently to produce enough penicillin to supply the entire city for the duration of the year.
That evening and the subsequent weeks that the bread decomposed on the counter, I learned a couple important lessons about perfect results.
Perfect Results
- Parents are Imperfect– In reality, I already knew that parents were not perfect but my father was not one to admit to his own imperfection. His annoying habit was to act as if he was only the second man in history to have been known to walk on water and turn water into wine. However, this time, the Bungling Bread Maker had no choice but to admit to his failing. His attempt to make bread was a colossal failure and there were witnesses to attest to his failure. Failure at making bread equaled my father was not perfect – there were no perfect results.
- Directions are Key – My father had to exit the bread making business before he could even get started. His failure was self-inflicted because he refused to follow directions. Each package contained directions to make a perfect loaf of bread – to get perfect results. However, my father, like so many men, could not be bothered with directions. He was a man’s man and knew more than the person who wrote the directions. Unfortunately, for him, he really didn’t know more than the person who wrote the directions.
On occasion, I have looked back on my father’s bread making tragedy for more than a good laugh. Thanks to that cooking calamity, I have been able to remind myself and now my son that in life perfection may be the goal but imperfection is human. So don’t beat yourself up if everything doesn’t go as initially planned. Simply try again and hopefully learn from the previous encounter – unlike my father who refused to follow the directions. Speaking of directions, remember directions exist for a reason so follow them. Sometimes we are imperfect only because we refuse to follow the directions that have been prepared for us.
Do you expect to be perfect? Do you expect your children to be perfect? Do you know how to follow directions?