CHEF DE CUISINE

There’s one tremendous, non-obvious benefit to Serena’s arrival in our house: Now, at least, there’s one person around here who’s always satisfied with the food I prepare for her.

Sure, it’s a hollow victory. After all, she’s never tasted anything but formula. If it were a choice between formula and starvation, I think we’d all learn to like formula. (Maybe–I tried some, and it’s pretty gross.) But do you understand what I’m up against?

I have a six-year-old whose favorite foods are sliced raw mushrooms, instant mashed potatoes–no butter or salt, please–and boneless, skinless chicken breast cooked to the point that it makes drywall look as juicy as Georgia watermelon. She also likes candy (but who doesn’t?) and Chicken McNuggets, even though I’ve patiently explained to her that those things are made by sticking a bird in a blender, pushing the FRAPPE button, and deep-frying what they scrape off the sides of the carafe. Doesn’t matter to her. They’re non-meaty meat; a protein product whose flavor is indistinguishable from the batter surrounding it. All crunch, no munch.

And then there’s my wife, whose motto is “If it has cheese, it should have extra cheese.” She can eat the same thing six meals in a row, then get so thoroughly sick of whatever-it-is that she doesn’t want it for at least six months. She has a boundless capacity for anything cold and sugary. I’ve seen her eat an entire box of popsicles during back-to-back episodes of “The Real World,” guzzle two quarts of fruit juice in a single afternoon, plow through a box of Cookie Crisp in two days.

And more to the point, she really doesn’t eat any vegetables other than corn. Occasionally she’ll eat two or three slices of cooked carrot, but this is always accompanied by Loretta Young-like histrionics. And I cannot honestly testify that I’ve ever seen her eat anything which qualifies as “fruit.”

If you saw pictures of us, you’d quickly guess that one of us cannot conceive of a dinner without at least two vegetables, and one of us is where fried cheese expects to go when it dies. But you’d be precisely wrong about which one of us was which. (In case you’re wondering, my wife is exactly as thin as I am not.)

Onions make some people cry. They make me cry because I hardly ever eat any. Our family cuisine is a feedback loop of pot roast, scalloped potatoes, baked ham, and hamburgers. The only thing that ever changes is the side dish, and even those are on a tight rotation.

I’ve tried, Gentle Reader, goodness knows I’ve tried to expand our dining horizons. But that’s just about impossible when you’re cooking for a first-grader who won’t eat anything that looks like it may have touched something else on the plate, and a grown woman who’s so texture-fussy she’ll only eat certain parts of a snack cracker.

Now, understand, I consider myself an amateur cook of some considerable talent. People whom I know actually like my preaching have told me I missed my calling in life; I should’ve been a chef. (I always tell them that preachers work better hours and fewer weekends and holidays than chefs do, which is why I’m not a chef.) Much repetition has led me to create a pot roast that’s better than your mother’s, unless your mom was Julia Child. I can walk into almost any kitchen and improvise a soup, so long as you’ve been to the grocery store in the past week. My corn bread is pretty good for a Yankee, and when I make raw-fried potatoes, the angels sing.

And every night I set the fruits of my labors before all my beloved girls, and 60% of the time, at least half of it goes into the garbage.

My wife’s been angling for some chicken cordon bleu for some time now. It was on special at the butcher shop today, so we made some. Followed the butcher’s directions to a T. It wasn’t exactly wonderful, but I’ve paid more money for food less satisfying.

I finished mine. My wife ate three or four bites of hers.

The diagnosis was that it just “wasn’t right.” A little further probing uncovered that what she really likes is the frozen, precooked, pop-it-in-the-oven version of CCB, with process cheese and stabilized breading and all that. The kind that sort of deflates when you cut it because it was 50% air to begin with. That, to her, is good Chicken Cordon Bleu. That, to me, is a good argument for the depravity of American culture.

And it’s been like this with other things. She didn’t like my family’s cherished meatball recipe at first, though it has grown on her now that I make the meatballs about a third of the size my grandmother made them. Whaaat?

My efforts at producing an all-meat sort-of-Asian dish (a recipe I got from a Martin Yan cookbook) were met with rank disapproval. Tastes like soy sauce, she said, conveniently neglecting that soy sauce is a primary ingredient in a different meatball recipe she loves. Never mind that the meatball dish has three times the amount of soy sauce that the pork-chop dish has. Or that the pork-chop dish has six other ingredients in the sauce. Irrelevant.

And the great Swiss steak debacle still haunts our marriage. After all, there are tomatoes in my Swiss steak, an idea which never occured to her when she asked for Swiss steak.

It’s farcical. It’s not merely a tragedy but a travesty. I know I’m competent in the kitchen. I know the food I make tastes good. But the dinner table, for me, is a place of failure. It’s OK–but I could really go for a chocolate soda, she says, mid-bite.

The food theologian in me bristles. That’s not dinner! OK, maybe once in a while you can indulge your sweet tooth in place of, you know, an actual meal. But this is the fourth or maybe fortieth night in a row you’ve told me that you would gladly trade my two hours of hard work for sixty seconds’ effort on the part of a 16-year-old earning minimum wage at the custard stand.

The loving husband in me says, “So do you want me to get you one?”

“Naah. I’m alright,” she says, always wistfully, always pining for a world where every meal is taken at a drive-in where they don’t even offer lettuce for your burger.

It’s like dying a little death, every night around six o’clock. Mene mene tekel upHardee’s. You have been weighed in the balance, and I want cheese fries.

The bookshelf in my basement is stacked with cookbooks. Not for us down-home Aunt Mildred cookery, no glittery East Coast food porn, not even those giveaway “Eat Better With Frozen Butter Beans!” blasphemies. No, if a book purports to tell you how to cook like a diner cook whose onion supplier has abruptly quit the business, I’ve probably got it here somewhere. And even then, some of my plates are a tough sell.

Failure. I am condemned to spend every night in the kitchen, and to watch the best plates of my ministrations get picked at, shuffled around, damned with faint praise, and ultimately discarded, only to hear the potato chips RRRRIP open half an hour later.

But failure is a funny thing. Failure is, after all, the ultimate means of grace. The Cross is nothing less than the biggest example of bilateral loserhood the world has ever known. God came and walked among us and failed to convince us he was who he really was–and we failed to recognize him even though he’d spent the previous seven hundred years telling anybody who would listen that he was coming.

Every day I hear ads for churches who invite me to come and “claim my share of the victory.” Every week I get five or six slick direct-mail appeals for church-growth programs of one stripe or another and they all have the same basic message: “We can turn your ministry from failure to success, as measure by the number of butts you plant in the seats and/or the amount of money you pry loose to fund your latest bulding program.” And every year the sum total of what I’ve done, the measure of fifty-two hard weeks of ministry, is reduced to two numbers: the differential between income and expenses, and the differential between new members joining and members transferring out. Keep the balance toward the former items in both cases, and all is well.

It’s completely bogus. Any church worth its salt will tell you that your share of the victory is irrelevant–what you really need to get your hands on is your share of the defeat. God has little use for winners. After all, they keep walking around like they’re better than everybody else. We praise winners for showing some small measure of humility–but if it’s humility we value, why don’t we celebrate the humiliated?

I’m seriously tempted this year to include a few new line items in my annual report: Programs Failed, Bad Ideas Implemented, Persons I Attempted To Reach But Could Not, Potentially Productive Afternoons Squandered In Theological Contemplation. To my mind, that’s the true measure of a ministry–not its successes, but its failures. Anybody can hire a consultant to come in and give you a program that is all but guaranteed to succeed because it’s already worked at fifteen other churches just like yours. All you have to be is the cook who follows the recipe without substituting out any of the ingredients, thus producing middle-of-the-road Long John McApplebee’s cuisine which neither challenges nor delights anyone.

But I don’t want to be the cook. I want to be the chef who walks into the kitchen, finds a blackened banana, some salt pork, and a can of Squirt, then comes out of the kitchen an hour later with something nobody’s tasted before but everybody wants to taste again. That’s my idea of ministry. And you only need two things to bring that about. The first, of course, is the willingness to fail. You can’t be afraid to cook without a recipe, risky though it is. After all, a recipe reflects experience and wisdom. But to be the one who writes the recipes, you’ve got to be willing to fall flat on your face from time to time. So you have to embrace not just the possibility of failure, but the reality of it . . . even the desirability of it.

The other thing you need is a willingness to remember that you’re cooking for the regulars, not the foodies . . . but that’s another story for another day (soon).