Crock-pot love

If I have learned anything from this (and every) season of The Bachelor it is this:
Love cannot be microwaved.

This is me when I sit down to the meal

Let me explain. I am no chef and to be quite frank, the act of cooking just stresses me out. There is a lot of heat involved in cooking. For one meal I can end up having the stove and three burners on, my hair is frizzing up, my pits are sweating and I am just feeling like an overall mess. I also find that in the midst of trying to get the timing right, I end up burning something - be it the food or my hand (typically both) and when I finally sit down to eat I am like a poodle in heat. I am also an emotional eater, so I am typically snacking during the process of cooking and not even hungry by the time the meal is ready.

Don't accept a Mac & Cheese Wannabe

All of this leads me back to my culinary comfort zone - the microwave. A place where I can zap my food in five minutes with no thought, no sweating, and no long wait period. There is no clean up, and barely any time to snack before the meal is ready. The heat concentrates fast and can turn ice into chicken - a tiny miracle of sorts. It seems like a wonderful solution, when it fact I am consuming food that is very high in sodium and probably giving myself cancer by eating out of the microwaved plastic containers. I am deceiving myself and taking the easy way out. And probably going to end up suing Lean Cuisine for my premature death.

But guess what friends - there is a happy medium for beginners to the cooking world and it is called THE CROCK-POT. The concept is genius - correctly measure and dump all of the contents of your recipe into a pot, and slow cook it throughout the day - set it and forget it. You can take your time in the store to pick out all the right ingredients, but you don't have to slave over a stove. There are many different kinds of recipes, but all of them cook slowly with just the right amount of heat, blending the flavors together over time. When you come back to your kitchen, you have a wonderful meal waiting which can be healthy and yet very low maintenance.

Real love cooking right here.

That is the kind of love that lasts - Crock-pot love. So many people jump into relationships when the heat is too high and the timing is wrong, and find themselves unfulfilled and unsatisfied with the end result. People in these kind of relationships get burned, and of course after an episode like that, there is a whole hell of a lot of clean up. Then there are the relationships in which it is almost too easy and too comfortable but because you are rushing in and aren't putting in the real work, you end up deceiving yourself and your partner by not being true to what you really want and need. It may be instant gratification that allures you to your comfort zone, but it does not last a lifetime or truly do a body good.

The best kind of relationship is the kind that cooks slowly - that has all of the right ingredients that may take time to marinate together, but in the end evolve into a flavorful end result. It is not instant gratification and it does take some work, but it is the right kind of work - choosing your recipe and your ingredients carefully, but letting the natural chemistry of the cooker do the rest. It is the kind of heat that grows over time but will never get too hot to burn you. It is the kind of effort that fills you up, but doesn't in turn make your pits sweat or your body endure cancer-causing radiation.

So I encourage you all to wait for your Crock-pot kind of love. It may take some time to find and master, but when you do, you'll never want to cook another way again.