Cooking Lessons

I made Sloppy Joes for dinner last week.  It's been a really long time since I've fixed them and I had to stop for a minute to remember just what ingredients I needed. As I ran through the list in my head, I remembered an incident that happened many years ago.

I use mustard in my Sloppy Joes sauce.  And one night as I was serving them to my family, my husband made a comment that he wasn't all that fond of the mustard in the sauce. "Really? Well, I'm not that fond of the liquid smoke that you put in your sauce," I thought to myself.  And since my kids liked them and it was a recipe from my mother, I figured I'd just keep on making them my way... which I did.

The funny thing is that when we were first married, I stopped using my mother's recipe for spaghetti sauce because my husband didn't like the tomato soup that the recipe called for.  I looked until I found  another recipe which we liked, though I must admit that I missed my mom's recipe.  Of course all of that is a moot point, since these days, my spaghetti sauce almost always comes from a jar!

Now, before you get the wrong idea about my husband, just let me say that he is the easiest person in the world to cook for. He is very appreciative of the meals I fix and is extremely easy-going about what we have for dinner.  AND he jumps in and does some of the cooking himself.  So don't be hard on him.

It's just that as I made my Sloppy Joes last week...complete with mustard...I wondered why I had held my ground on the Sloppy Joes yet changed the way I made spaghetti. Both recipes had come from my mother and I liked them.

While I couldn't really come up with a logical reason for my choices, I did see a little life lesson.  There are times in life when we stand our ground...for whatever reasons...and other times when we are flexible and willing to change. Sometimes we sacrifice, other times we stand firm. It's all simply part of the give and take of life. And it's only when we each find the right combination of the two that we truly learn to live well with others.

By the way... last week, my husband ate a pretty healthy helping of Sloppy Joes...mustard and all!