Treat Yourself!

I recently read "The Little Red Hen" to my Kindergarten class.  Their immediate response was, "She's mean!"  But then I realized they were only saying what they thought I wanted to hear.  There is another version where the Little Red Hen bakes bread from her organically grown wheat and puts it on-line in a food blog. She shares the experience and waits for the comments to pour in. Or she invites everyone over for a 'bread tasting' and tries to sound surprised at the ecstatic compliments about her bread-making skills. This would mirror my experience of housekeeping to impress, or cooking to please someone else.

I've just finished baking a kale and rosemary quiche.  You could say it was a bit of an experiment, motivated by the last of the kale growing in my waning garden and the desire to pick rosemary.  I haven't tasted it yet, but I'm sure it is good enough to feed me for the rest of the week, along with my rosemary chicken.  I might smother it with my homemade chutney.  I was thinking of making some fresh melon chutney with the sad looking melons softening on the vines, but a gallon of chutney is enough. 
The first time I tried making chutney was when I lived isolated on a Pacific island and couldn't buy the stuff.  I remember my boys begged me not to try again because the smell drove them gagging outside. Since then I have been able to find the jars in specialty Indian shops. This time I made chutney just because I wanted to. I enjoyed peeling and chopping the tomatoes, crushing the garlic and adding the ginger.  And any dish is an excuse for me to pick and chop the fresh herbs from my herb garden. The result was altogether too watery, yet quite tasty.  Not really good enough to give away as a gift, and I don't know anybody who craves tomato chutney either.

My boys are away at college and Jon would prefer a burger with a can of beans. So my experimenting with different recipes is all about what I enjoy.  And I enjoy the growing, harvesting and preparing as much as the tasting.  I am starting to experiment now that the pressure to impress someone else is off my plate. At coffee hour this morning a friend casually remarked that she'd had home-made pizza. I was delighted to find that she made her own crust without a recipe. "I just mix things in with the yeast and flour."  I am only starting to cook like that, since now I am the only one to eat it.  I add mint and nasturtium flowers whenever possible.

 This is new to me: the act of basing choices solely on what I enjoy doing. It is discovering intrinsic motivation, about 50 years too late. I clean up the house and decorate with fresh flowers because that makes me happy.  I grow lavender just because there is nothing better than the scent.  I hunt down mincemeat and make pies that remind me of family and happiness. I have a whole slew of Brazilian recipes that are my comfort food.  They remind me of childhood and simpler times, as well as being tasty.  They are all part of my "me time". 
My most precious "me time" is when I sit down with a glass of wine to write this blog.   And I can scroll through my past memories, photos of beautiful people and places I've been, and feel thankful. The irony behind this is that I started recording my thoughts three years ago during a time when chaos and misery reigned, and I couldn't see the good through the haze of bad.  Now I look back on those years in a different way through the eyes of my blog.