Sophie Rapeepat | Head Editor
October 11, 2023
Have you ever tried making pasta? I don’t mean just boiling the store-bought noodles and adding canned sauce. I’m talking about the whole ordeal, and what it takes to put together each ingredient one at a time.
My friends and I love to hold cooking competitions where we pick a recipe and attempt to make elaborate meals that both taste good and look presentable. Most of the time, our creations take over three hours longer to make than expected, and barely turn out half-edible, even though we follow the directions to a tee.
On Sunday, my friend and I attempted to make pesto fettuccine from scratch. We blended the roasted nuts and greens, and mixed together the flour and eggs to form pasta dough. Without a pasta machine to flatten the dough into strips, it took us over two hours to just roll it thin enough to resemble fettuccine. After a long evening of loving labor, the result was an inedible, disgraceful mess. We ended up just going out to eat at In-N-Out.
My point is that sometimes we do everything right. We try our best and do exactly what we are supposed to do. But despite all our prayers and our dreams and our desperate manifestations, things just sometimes don’t work out the way we want them to. Sometimes it’s just better to buy the pasta from the store.
Our failed pesto fettuccine was a time-consuming disaster and a complete waste of food. But senior Tyler Kinney had a different perspective on the topic, “It’s easy to get caught up striving for a goal; but, sometimes we just need to hit pause and count our blessings instead of our problems.”
Never have I laughed as hard as I did while spilling flour all across the floor or overflowing the blender with green goo. Of course, the anticlimactic result of our hard work was disappointing. But somewhere along the way, I forgot completely about what we were trying to do and instead started enjoying the funny hiccups of the moment.
Junior PJ Sharpe explained how “everything is what you make of it. Nothing will ever go perfectly, but your attitude can completely change how you remember an experience.”
Cooking has taught me patience and compromise, and doing it with friends is an amazing way to trauma bond. Maybe I’m just trying to find an excuse for my offensive cooking skills, but experiences like this have also shown me that there is more to life than achieving perfection.
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