Hurt, Pray, Cook

In Elizabeth Gilbert's brilliant book Eat, Pray, Love she takes her reader on a virtual trip through Italy, India, and Indonesia. She spent four months in each country to basically heal her life, and her story is a great read and even better inspiration.

These last few days I've borrowed some of that, not only limited to the title of this post...

I mentioned this on one of my SportsBites radio shows as well. When I am hurting, I do two things. I pray and I cook. More often than not, I do both things together and not only because it makes the food I'm preparing taste even better. It just makes me feel better.

Having been raised Catholic with strict rules and regulations on how to pray (and how to do everything else), quite honestly I have tossed all of that and am pleased to report that for years now I have just made up my own prayers (and my own rules and regulations). So far that has worked out really well for me.

Cooking is one of the most sacred activities I practice. My cookbook is titled Angel Food. It has nothing to do with angel food cake and has everything to do with invoking and welcoming Divine presence when I cook. This is both for my benefit and healing, and usually for the people I am cooking for as well. But since I regularly cook for just me, and lately my heart is hurting, my kitchen has felt like one of the safest places to be. 

There is something about working with dough or pastry or chopping vegetables or folding a perfect omelette that just feels really good. The other day I made chocolate chip cookie dough partially just because I love that it was the first recipe I ever learned with my mom, and partially because I wanted to bring cookies to people I was meeting at an Italian festival on Saturday. 

I made the cookies, packaged them up, and forgot to take them with me. So my lovely friend Tina, whom I shared the evening with because it felt really good to have someone for dinner, happily took them home. 

This was after we learned that our evening's other main event, the encore broadcast of the Euro Cup match between Spain and Sweden was on at 10:30pm EST, not PST, and we'd completely missed it. Oh well. Our Greek tacos for dinner followed by Tina's gift of cherry pie had made for a wonderful meal, so we were happy.

I spent the part of Fathers Day that I wasn't a zombie-slug, making homemade Bolognese sauce for spaghetti, with some little homemade rolls, which leftover I will love enjoying tonight. My dad loved pasta with meat sauce. At home in our family we always loved spaghetti left over, the next day. Personally I love it anytime. It was the perfect meal to think of him by.

Yeah. Just some notes on feeling better through cooking and food I guess. Not what pop culture would necessarily subscribe to but surely we all know how much I care about that.

By the way, in case you haven't read it yet, I can't begin to tell you how happy the ending is in the book Eat Pray Love. And it's a true story. Everything that unfolded for her, she absolutely deserved and had coming to her. I love that book.

I trust that the good news in all of this, is that we all deserve an ending at least that happy. 

I very much look forward to mine.