Egg Accompli
♫ Sunday, March 8th, 2009“I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing more than half a dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished.” – Pride and Prejudice
I am not an “accomplished” person. I love the *idea* of being accomplished. But the thing itself suggests a certain application of patient, sequential effort over time. This is not my specialty.
My short attention span tends to get in the way, quite frankly. My older son, who I’m beginning to think might have a Quote-of-the-Month calendar stowed away somewhere, informed me the other day that “A lot of things are easy to learn, but hard to master.”
Yeah, well. I might add that a lot of things are *interesting* to learn but *boring* to master (but I didn’t, Because that is not the sort of message you are supposed to pass along to children for whom you are legally and morally responsible).
Anyway, most things I can do, I can only sort of do. I can sort of speak French, sort of play the piano, sort of understand how computers work and sort of train a dog.
And I can sort of cook. Now, there are people who would say that I can *really* cook, but let me make it clear–a *real* cook is the person who can whip up a lovely meal with a few things from the farmers market and the stuff in your pantry you thought you’d never get rid of. When a *real* cook makes dinner, the kitchen still looks nice afterwards. A *real* cook has good quality knives she always keeps sharpened and the one excellent saucepan she purchased as a graduation gift to herself.
I am a sort of cook.
But here is one thing I can do: I can cook eggs. I poached a lovely egg for myself for breakfast just this morning. I make excellent poached eggs, perfect boiled eggs and scrambled eggs so good nobody in my family really wants to eat anyone else’s.
OK, it’s not much of an accomplishment, but everyone’s got to have something.
