Success: 10,000 hours of cooking

Perhaps you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers?  He talks about people who are generally considered to be talented geniuses – the Beatles and Bill Gates are a couple of examples.  Gladwell’s premise is that  these people are not just geniuses but actually became masters due to the crazy number of hours spent practicing their craft.  Specifically, he estimates 10,000 hours as the rough amount of practice it takes for someone to truly master a complex skill. 
 

This is the sort of information that could make a person feel inadequate.  I haven’t even been employed for the last seven or so years, much less have I been closing in on mastery of some respectable and lucrative skill like writing legal briefs or tying tiny sutures in heart valves.

However, as I reflected on this, I realized that I must be approaching 10,000 hours of cooking.  True,  I am at a very safe distance from being a genius chef.  But I have been cooking one whole day a week, every week, for almost the last twenty years.  Missing a few days a year here and there, figuring a seven-hour day, I’ve probably got a solid 7,000 cooking hours under my belt.  And I have to say, I have noticed subtle but solid improvements lately.  I improvise a lot more, and a lot more successfully.  I have a better sense of what flavors go together well.  More often I can open up the fridge and throw something delicious together from unlikely and uninspiring ingredients.  I have more cooking mojo. 

No matter how many thousands of hours I cook, I will never be a celebrity chef, nor do I aspire to this.  I’m not spending my 10,000 hours practicing restaurant food.  That’s not the point.  I cook for me, my family and sometimes my friends.  Every hour I cook I’m aiming for an elusive combination of food that is healthy, inexpensive, varied, local-ish and organic-ish, and made from ingredients available in my fridge and pantry, among other considerations.  Mostly, it has to be delicious to four different people with varying tastes, two of whom aren’t tall enough to get a drinking glass out of the cupboard.

Perhaps in a few years I’ll have developed enough talent to subscribe to a CSA farm box.  Maybe be then I will welcome the challenge of weekly winter squash for four months.

Do you have 10,000 hours of practice with anything?

Mixed Holidays

I've failed to post anything about the holiday season until February.  Consider this the equivalent of still having my Christmas lights up on Groundhog Day.

Another Christmas and birthday season steamrolled through our home leaving the four of us happy and exhausted.  My boys have birthdays one day apart, just days before Christmas.  This year I tried to manage the festivities a little differently to tamp down the insanity, with mixed results.  Some of the things I tried:

Four year old birthday party:  At our house, invited the whole preschool.  Crossed my fingers that half of the preschool parents would be out of town or working (we like everyone but didn't really want to have a party for twenty kids and twenty parents.)  We had seven kids, which was perfect.  We requested books as presents at both kids' parties.  Both kids hated this idea but rolled with it. We ordered pizza takeout and I paid a friend with a baking business on the side to make the cupcakes.  In a perfect world I would have made the pizza, but most very small children consider homemade pizza to be "pflaugh" in my experience.

I prepared my extra-special low carbon-footprint goody bags (cheapskate goody bags.)  Here's how I do it: Save all bags from goody bags at parties throughout the year.  While the kids are sleeping, gather together all of the really crappy tiny plastic toys they've gotten throughout the year.   Get out the extra bags of tiny plastic crappy toys you brilliantly bought during summer yard saling.  Distribute everything in the bags, then toss in some random leftover stickers.  Finally, add a pinch of the leftover Halloween candy your kids didn't really like.  Seal bags with another sticker (your children may not be allowed to look in bags and see their own toys).

Overall, a very successful and cheap party.

Seven year old birthday party:  Gave into my husband who insisted that our son really wanted a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party.  Pared the guestlist viciously to afford the least outrageous party package.  Hired a ten year old friend to babysit our four year old at Chuck E. Cheese during the party.  Got a table directly in front of the loudspeaker.  Ordered and ignored some truly awful food.  Felt certain that the really nice woman who was our "party coordinator" could not possibly be well paid enough.  Bought and gave out official Chuck E. Cheese party bags, which included a CD of the greatest hits of Chuck E. Cheese (free to the first two people who request them!) Will be saving contents for next year's five year old party bags.    Left with a beaming seven year old who talked about his party for days.

Overally, a very successful and expensive party.

Christmas:  In past years, we have opened everything on the evening of the 24th (my family tradition).  Typically the kids are thrilled with the first gift and want to play with it immediately.  I have to divert their attention to gift opening rather than playing.  Repeat with gift numbers two and three.  By gift number twelve they have become crazed entitlement monsters shredding wrapping paper and comparison shopping amongst their gifts.  This year I decided that we would do things more like Hannukah and open just one gift  a day, until Christmas when they could open stockings the night before and the remaining presents in the morning.  The idea was that they could focus on just one gift at a time and get all possible enjoyment out of it.  My plan was thwarted in several ways. 

First, the kids did not have the same break this year.  They were supposed to open a present each morning of the vacation, giving them more time to enjoy each present and a built-in activity each day of the break.  However my first-grader's school went until December 23rd this year.  So we opened a few in the evenings after the birthday hoopla had come and gone and still had bunches on Christmas morning.  I decided to break with all tradition and saved even more gifts to open for several days after Christmas.  This went surprisingly well, because I hid these gifts and did not tell the kids that they existed until each morning when - surprise! - Santa found some extra gifts to deliver late.

Second, my husband told me the day before Christmas that he had very strong and previously unexpressed feelings about how stockings had to be opened on Christmas morning.  This meant that even more gifts got lumped together on Christmas morning instead of being spread out over several days.  So we still ended up with the traditional opening of far too many gifts at once, followed by the traditional Christmas pouting over the gifts. 

Overall about half of the gifts from us came from garage saling over the summer.  I'm keeping it up as long as the kids don't notice or care.

Later on Christmas Day while walking through Muir Woods, taking in some of the tallest and most magnificent trees in the world, my seven year old said "when are we going to do something good?"  Fortunately we had just walked by a young boy glued to an electronic game out in the redwoods, so I didn't feel as though I had produced the most awful child in the world.  Later the kids got to buy a bag of polished rocks in the gift shop, so as far as they were concerned the nature experience wasn't a total waste of time.

Good news from Christmas!  We get a little closer to a zero-waste holiday each year.  This year's tally:
The bottom bag is stuffed with gift bags and wrappings we reuse each year.  The middle bag is full of paper and plastic recycling.  The tiny sandwich bag on the top contains the actual garbage from this year's wrapping.  Not bad.