Sustenance for The Spirit
For me, cooking is a quest. As an example, I like to keep things simple with one bowl desserts, meaning the ingredients can all be dumped into one bowl, stirred with one spoon, and baked in one pan. You can easily deduce that I’m no gourmet, but I can transform leftovers into a pretty healthy, tasty and not bad-looking meal, so I’m no slacker in the kitchen. My grandmother was a huge influence on my cooking and she was from the generation I call the original organics, because they were organic by default, before it was cool. My grandmother cooked predominantly by scratch, sometimes following a recipe, but often not. I actually own and occasionally use her hand crank egg whipper thing (not sure of the official name). It works great when you need those eggs beaten for a chess pie, and I burn off a few extra calories in the process. My family knows that something that will never be on my wish list is an electric kitchen gadget. (Confession: I do own and use a few, only very “necessary” electric appliances, like a toaster, a coffee maker, a crockpot, an instant pot, a small and large mixer and a blender, a chopper, and I think that’s all.)
My husband recently brought me the pepper harvest from our garden…I think there were five or six. They were good looking peppers, and I had tasted the initial one or two, and they were good, peppery but not too hot. So, what was I going to do with my handful of peppers? For some reason, it reminded me of the pepper sauce that always graced my grandmother’s table. I googled “pepper sauce” and discovered that it was simple. Once I located an empty olive oil bottle with cork top that I cleaned, I cut the peppers to stuff them into the bottle, heated some vinegar and then poured it over the peppers to just under the top of the bottle…and when it runs low I only have to add more vinegar. I’ve tasted it and it’s pretty good, “if I must say so myself,” which was the phrase we often heard from my grandmother after tasting one of her own culinary offerings.
Once you become aware of it, you don’t need a lot of fancy stuff to cook good food. The recipes I seek and hold most dear are the ones that require few, simple ingredients, that I can creatively alter by adding vanilla or cinnamon, nuts, fruit or oatmeal, and that I don’t have to employ anything plugged into the wall. I also prefer recipes with someone’s name attached. The old cookbooks are the best, especially the old church cookbooks, chock full of tried and true family dishes, with a name attached. No one is going to make put their name at the bottom of a recipe in a church cookbook unless it’s a really, really good one. Am I right?
If cooking can be this simple, why does it have to be made complicated? Now that we have YouTube and the cooking shows on TV, anyone can become a gourmet. That is, if you can find the ingredients and if you have the right cookware and/or gadget(s), not mentioning the right kind of oven/stove, oh, and knife skills. Before we know it, we’ve spent more money and time for something that looks questionable and may require courage and fortitude to eat. Your gourmet adventures in cuisine may be more successful than mine, so ignore my sarcasm if you wish.
Experiencing life and culture in our current world can be much the same, including our Christian existence. We can make things harder than they have to be. In James 1:27, the NIV reads, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Staying focused on the simple nature of Christianity is sometimes challenging. We can get distracted with programs, planning, problems with people and general selfish disillusionment, when serving God is really pretty simple. Take care of others and keep ourselves as pure as possible. Easier said, but being reminded helps, and there’s a whole Bible of scripture to encourage us. Keep your faith gadget-free.
Stay focused on the simple calling, the clear nature and the single voice of God’s Holy Spirit. Join God in His presence each day. Praise Jesus and His sacrifice in your daily existence by offering help and comfort to others. Keep it simple and have a wonderful day!
