My first baby recently moved away. There is a swelling in my heart when I think of her, navigating the world on her own, experiencing the exhaustion and exhilaration of independence, a world of opportunity before her as she creates a recipe for her future. And I am so proud of her. And I miss her deeply. And she came home for dinner this week.
So, I had it all planned out. I was going to make my old friend Joe’s Killer Lasagna and his Marinated Italian Salad because I could do this all the night before. I would have a couple of hours in the evening to leisurely put it together, taking my time with the sauce, chopping and sauteing vegetables, browning the perfect combination of ground beef and Italian sausage, expertly smoothing ricotta over al dente noodles and building layer after layer of gooey lasagna goodness. And I would wake up in the morning knowing that when I got home from work at the end of the day the only thing I’d need to do was pop that baby in the oven and wait for my house to smell amazing…
…And then life happened…
A business call that should have lasted 10 minutes took an hour and a half and just like that my leisurely evening was no more. So I didn’t follow the recipe. Or precook the noodles. And my sauce simmered for a mere 20 minutes while I hastily browned the meat and decided to leave the mushrooms out completely. And instead of shredding the cheese I cut it into chunks and there was to be no careful smoothing of ricotta because it’s a casserole, right?
It all spreads out as it bakes anyway. An hour after I hung up the phone my lasagna was in the fridge, my salad was marinating, dishes were done, counters were wiped and I was drifting off for some much needed sleep.
I think life is like that. We start out with a recipe, a time-line, a predetermined idea of how things will be and then “life happens” and we have to do some rethinking. Maybe it’s lost time. Or a missing ingredient. Or we realize right in the middle of things that we don’t have the tools we need for the job we’ve set out to do. And that’s where we learn to think on our feet, to improvise, to forge ahead choosing to believe that the end result will be worth the effort we put in.
And in this case it was. To be completely honest it was the best lasagna I’ve ever made. Or maybe it was the company…
