“Let no feeling of discouragement prey upon you, and in the end you are sure to succeed.”
~ Abraham Lincoln
It’s easy to give in to discouragement. As I sat this beautiful still morning, I wondered … Does the sun get discouraged by clouds? Of course not. It rises above, each and every day LOL …
In a perfect world, all I would have worked on this week is a cook-booklet for Summer Entertaining. It hasn’t happened this way. To pretend I have 24 hours in the day to devote to my cooking would be like trying to get that cat to bark. It’s just not going to happen. And I’m ok with this. I love the other aspects of my life, even if there are days that I’m at my whits end trying to keep them all moving along.
So I carved out a day to work on one of the five menus I had designed, a summer inspired mexican pot luck, using a well known veggie meat substitute. I expected the hard part would be putting my recipes and photos into a design format, using a new Desktop Publishing software I’ve purchased.
Wouldn’t you know it … The problems came with the recipes themselves, which is the last thing I expected !!
It’s taken me three days to actually get the full meal on the table !! Thank goodness I didn’t have guests coming!!
Day 1 …. Pretty much a disaster. By the time I finished, I wasn’t even hungry …
The avocados I purchased to make guacamole looked beautiful on the outside, but the insides were bland and mealy. I know it was the crappy avocado, but still, it’s left me wondering if my recipe is sound enough to publish.
Spencer wanted to try making refried beans from scratch. Easy enough, but this added alot of time, to an already complex casserole I was working through, and they turned out very average.
I then saw an idea for a tomatillos rice. I head to my pantry, and can you believe I was out of my normal brand of long-grain white rice? Villa guests had left me another unlabeled brand … Must have been short grain, because my rice turned to wallpaper paste. And the tomatillos water for the rice tasted as bitter as aloe.
Day 2, Spencer didn’t get home until 8PM, and we were both too tired to cook.
Day 3, I finally had success.
I remade the refried beans in a slow cooker … A new method, which worked beautifully, and will free up any cook to focus on the casserole.
I picked up some rice at the store, and reworked one of my own rice recipes to give it a mexi-twist. But even still, I almost burned my rice last night (seriously!).
I went to put together a little salad side dish, “garbage” as we call it down here. Out came my container of veg sour cream substitute, and wouldn’t you know it, I accidentally picked up cream cheese at the grocery.
I hope my little story has given you pause for chuckle. Am I giving up ?? Absolutely not. I learned the power of persistence. As my go-getter friend Bridgette wrote me yesterday:
“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what! Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.”
Mike Norton writes:
“Never say that you can’t do something, or that something seems impossible, or that something can’t be done, no matter how discouraging or harrowing it may be; human beings are limited only by what we allow ourselves to be limited by: our own minds. We are each the masters of our own reality; when we become self-aware to this: absolutely anything in the world is possible. Master yourself, and become king of the world around you. Let no odds, chastisement, exile, doubt, fear, or ANY mental virii prevent you from accomplishing your dreams. Never be a victim of life; be it’s conqueror.”
So to quote the great Vincent Van Gogh:
In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil (knives), which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing (cooking and publishing).
So if I inspired you to pick up a project over the last few days, and you too have hit the wall of discouragement, jump on over it please !!! Good luck !!!!
Interested in my Vegan Inspired Summer Entertaining Menu? It’ll be published (eventually) at: TheTwistedVegan.com
