A Recipe for Disaster

July 11, 2010

My sister-in-law called last week to ask for the recipe for my famous bean dip. I should have given her my recipe because then when I showed up for the party, I could have eaten my famous bean dip. Instead I dug to the back of the drawer with the plastic bags and aluminum foil and saran wrap and wax paper and straws and other loose floating recipes, and repeated for her the recipe given to me over six years ago.

I did tell her how I changed the recipe. “I leave out the jalapenos and the onions. Oh, and I add gabanzo beans and black beans. It makes the dip more colorful.”

“How much cilantro, exactly?”

This is where I should have known that she was not listening, not even interested in my famous recipe, but wanting to follow a recipe.

I showed up to the party, went straight for the dip and was disappointed when I saw chunks of onions and bits of jalapenos floating among the delicious corn, kidney beans, chunks of tomatoes all awash with Robusto Italian Dressing (DO NOT SUBSTITUTE).

I never learned to cook by recipe. Not that my mom didn’t try to teach me. I just found the idea of following directions to prepare food so boring. I would quickly lose interest, grab a handful of Saltines and be off to bigger and better things.

And so it is with my life. I know the advice is to find a person who has accomplished what you want, then follow in his or her footsteps, but I can’t shake the feeling that everything is about context.

If you add onions because the recipe says to add onions, I won’t eat it. I don’t care that the onions have been cooked and I won’t even taste them. I don’t care that you left them big enough for me to pick out easily. I don’t like onions and just looking at them has made me lose my appetite. It’s an onion context I’m not comfortable with.

So, I don’t care that J.K. Rowling wrote her books on napkins in coffee shops while homeless. I’m pretty sure that recipe is not going to work for me. I’m not interested in the fact that the experts say to diversify my portfolio. I know where my money is working for me, and I think I will stick with that, thank you very much. Also, I’m not interested in how great your approach to life is working for you. I prefer to find my own approach. Sure, it may look like a disaster from where you are standing, but so did being homeless and writing books on napkins and look how that turned out.

Next time someone asks me for a recipe, I will be sure to recite the way that I make the dish, even if it means I have to say, “I just pour until the dish is filled within a half inch of the rim.”

And I will always wait to be asked. And I will always preface the giving of recipes, for food, life, following dreams, with “This is what works for me” and never “This is what you should do.”

So, I have to admit, I think following recipes is a disaster, for me.

This week I will make my own recipes and eat the food I made.