Other than flying off to eat somewhere special, where the meal is carefully created by someone else – someone more deliberate and intentional than you are with the food, the next best thing is to “become” that somewhere else.
We all have pictures and images in our minds; the things we see when we are eyes are busy looking at the task in front of us – the eyes of our mind often filled with other things… the worst that can happen; the horrible things that did happen, or something more annoying.
But, if we can simply shift that vision, just a bit, and recall a memory of that special place. Maybe the night when it was so cold, and you trotted down the street in the pouring rain, under the shared umbrella, with the point that always caught you on the side of your freshly washed and dried hair, so that the water poured down into a steady stream on your head. When you were so cold, and you couldn’t find the restaurant the concierge said would be so “splendid,” and block after block, after sodden block, you turned to see the candles flickering through the window, as people huddled together around wine and fresh baked bread. You looked at the menu, on the stand outside the restaurant, written in French, and said, “let’s just go here…”
And there you found, in that tiny spot, tucked away in a place no one has ever heard of, and that you are sure you will never visit again, because it was too dark and rainy to see the sign that carried the name, a place where someone peeled the carrots, and the potatoes, and made an exquisite pot roast, elevating such an ordinary food, effortlessly, to delectable. And the atmosphere, on that dreary, rainy Monday night, was so festive, that you thought you would never have a mundane moment every again, in your entire life.
There was nothing special about that food; I’m guessing… only that the cook had his mind already elevated, to someplace festive, all nice and warm and toasty.
And that is how you peel the potatoes, and the carrots, and baste the roast… the recipe is already inside of you. Just think of somewhere else, far away… and you transform the ordinary.