Week 3: Chopping and Mixing

Sometimes you need to get your hands a little dirty…

This post is the third in a series called “Cooking with Sarah.” Each Sunday evening, my wife and I prepare, cook and eat a meal together — intentionally. Every Friday, I’ll be sharing our experience here in this space. I want to see the growth that will come in our marriage because of this. I hope you enjoy our story. You can find last week’s post here.

The day was rolling along like most Sundays.

Sarah and I had gone to church, gone for a walk and I went to the store to buy some groceries. It was a beautiful sunny day, somewhat rare for March in northern Indiana.

For Sunday dinner, Sarah and I had decided to make mozzarella-stuffed turkey meatballs. Once I came home with the groceries, it was time to cook!

I asked what I could do to help. Cutting the cheese (stop laughing Sarah) seemed like an obvious first step. So I grabbed a knife and started chopping away.

“Stop!” came a shrill voice from over my shoulder.

“You’re going to cut yourself. Here, let me do it.” Sarah explained.

I watched as she proceeded to cut up the mozzarella in the exact same way I had been doing it. Oh well. Surely there was another task I could help out with.

Let me stop for a second to say that this little interaction exemplifies one of my favorite aspects of the cooking tradition Sarah and I have started.

At first, yes, it was frustrating that Sarah took over for me. I was perfectly capable of chopping up the cheese, and since a knife was involved, it felt like a “manly” task. Did it make sense that she stopped me to chop in seemingly the same fashion? NO! It made no sense at all. My gut reaction was to argue and protest this perceived slight.

However, I quickly realized that there’s always another way to help.

When you’re cooking, there are many things that need to come together to create the finished product. What makes even less sense than Sarah asking to take over the cutting board is me arguing about it. There are so many other productive things to be doing.

When we’re cooking together, it’s imperative that we work as a team. If one person is doing everything, production quickly comes to a halt. But it’s when we work together towards a common goal that the magic really happens.

Okay, thanks for letting have that quick interjection. Back to the food!

The next step was mixing the cheese in with the ground turkey and spices. I got the turkey out and poured it into one of our favorite wedding gifts — the stand mixer. We put the cheese and spices in, andthen we turned on the machine.

It started moving, but there wasn’t a whole lot of mixing going on.

Like I said, we love our stand mixer. It works just fine. But this was a job to do by hand. I quickly volunteered.

I dipped my hands into the combination of meat, cheese and seasoning. It was cold and mushy. The cheese cubes slowly became enveloped by a blanket of raw meat.

I must not have been mixing things quite right because, again, Sarah asked to take over. I’ll be honest, I was glad to hand over the reins this time. I don’t always enjoy getting my hands dirty. But as I watched my wife mash the meat and cheese together, I noticed something.

Sometimes, you need to get your hands dirty.

The mixer can only do so much. All the machines, gizmos and gadgets in the world are great. But sometimes a little elbow grease does the trick. Once our concoction was properly mixed, we filled up a muffin tray and put it in the oven. Not much after that, we were ready to bite into our tasty creations.

Let me tell you, one bite of those meatballs and I knew it was completely worth getting my hands dirty.

The melted cheese aroused my taste buds amid the perfect mixture of meat and spices. But the lessons learned from a cutting board and the feeling of raw meat in between my fingers left the best taste in my mouth.