Inconvenience is a gift

This morning, while watching Easter service on my laptop, I was simultaneously slicing silver skin off lamb shanks in anticipation of tonight's dinner. I'd forgotten to take them out of the freezer the night before, so the two shanks were fused together. This made slicing the silver skin and excess fat off easier. As the surface began to warm up though, it started to get too slippery. The long and short of it was that I sliced my index finger right at the first knuckle.

It was the first Easter Sunday I heard about Christ dying for our sins on the cross while my finger was bleeding profusely.

The service ended, I bandaged myself up, got the shanks in the crock pot and started thinking about inconvenience. Slow cooking is the ultimate inconvenience. Sure, people tout the "no mess, no fuss" aspects of it. "You can throw in the ingredients as you are leaving for work and by the time you get back, dinner's ready." This is true. But it is also an eight to twelve-hour process that cannot be hurried. There's a lot of trust involved that it's going to turn out the way you want it to be. It's a bit like having faith in that regard.

There's always one point in the process, usually around four, where I poke at the meat and think, there's no way this is going to be done tonight. And I start coming up with a twenty-minute meal back-up plan just in case. In all this time, I've never had to resort to the contingency.

Like everything else I've been reminded of during the past six weeks, inconvenience is a gift. It forces you to slow down, and put your faith in something other than convenience. For instance, while making dinner last night, I saved the root stems of some leeks and planted them on our balcony, to see if something will shoot up. I've been doing this with a few different things including Meyer lemon, potato, garlic, leeks, avocado and various seeds for vegetables and plants I've had lying around since last year's spring planting.

It's too soon to tell what will grow, and when. At the moment, L.A. is still in a relatively cool period. We've had very little sun in the past few months and an incredible amount of rain. With the exception of one shoot I don't know what will come up, but I'm hoping a few things will for my own edification, not to mention appetite.

I get a sense of satisfaction in nurturing the seeds I've planted, watering them, and checking in on them every day to see how they are coming along. It's still early days. But the weather is supposed to warm up soon, and hopefully with it will come the sun as well.

This week, I made bread with my daughter. She didn't give the stand mixer enough time to form gluten in the dough, and so the result was crumbly and a little dry. But it was still fun to do. Taking the time needed to let the yeast do its thing and make the dough double in size. Letting nature take its course.

Off the top of my head, I can think of only two plants that grow quickly. Radishes grow from seed to ready-to-eat in just three weeks. And kudzu, the vine-like weed so prevalent throughout the south can grow up to a foot a day. These anomalies notwithstanding, the earth moves much slower.

And since we're part of the earth and part of nature, I'm hoping that we'll all remember this lesson once we're allowed to return to normal. Take-out and overnight mail and insta-responses are nice and all. But there's something to be said for inconvenience.