T-minus three days: Zen and the art of making mushroom soup

Slow day today. We made our schedule last night, and today's tasks include finishing the grocery shopping (easier said than done), making one batch of dough (in the evening, to let it ferment overnight), and straightening up a bit in advance of the mess-making to come (like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic).

While there's a pause in the prep, I want to share some words of wisdom from one of my favorite chefs, Deborah Madison. She used to be the chef at Greens, a San Francisco veggie restaurant that Michael and I sometimes ate at during our West Coast days. Her cookbook, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, is our go-to guide for everything: what temperature the oven should be for roasting squash, what flavors go well in a summer salad, how to know if a melon is ripe, how to make fresh pasta...the works.

In the introduction to the book, she tells a story about an incident at her restaurant, which I find useful to keep in mind when I'm making a fancy meal for company. In her own words:

When it comes to cooking for others, I have learned --- am still learning, in truth --- that it's best to keep your doubts and disappointments to yourself. When you cook, you're surrounding yourself with tastes and smells, so your food doesn't always deliver the vivid impression to you that it does to others. Apologizing only makes other uneasy, whereas with nothing said, they might be completely content. I once had restaurant customers raving about my "smoked" mushroom soup. Smoked mushrooms? I checked the pot and found, to my dismay, that the soup had scorched. I wanted to say, "You liked that?" But they were happy, so, with difficulty, I swallowed my embarrassment.

Her conclusion: "Don't apologize."

I love the mushroom soup story because it reminds me not to worry so much. Sure, I have a grand plan of how I want it all to work, and I'll be disappointed if things don't turn out the way I wanted them to. But even if something goes wrong, or turns out a little differently from how I pictured it, I'll be the only one to know. At best, I can patch up the mistake and pretend that it was meant to be that way all along. At worst, I'll have to plan something new. But that doesn't really matter. The food will be made with love, for family and friends, and it will be consumed with love, by family and friends. Sometimes that fact gets lost in the heat of the kitchen, when I'm trying to find that perfect ingredient or struggling to get the plating to look pretty. I just have to take a deep breath and remind myself that no matter what, dinner will be delicious and I will have nothing to apologize for.

Even if I scorch the mushroom soup.