Cute Vegetables

Cute Vegetables                April 2017

After deciding to make some bouillabaisse in my own style, I went to the market to shop for the fixins’ and saw some miniature eggplants. Half my brain thought they would be easier to cut up into chunks while the other half of my brain was asleep. That half was supposed to remind me that the eggplant had to be peeled.   The store had tiny bell peppers, miniature carrots, little potatoes, and all manner of small produce.

Then I got home.   After peeling the eggplant, there was only about sixty percent of it left. Oh, it tasted fine with the tomatoes, salmon, celery, orange peel, spices, pollock, garlic, scallops, and clams I added, but the output was significantly lower than just one normal eggplant would have been. My desire to “try something new” had overpowered what I understood about the basic eggplant that has served all of us so well over the decades past.

When we hear classical music, read the Bible, feed a baby with a spoon, consider the moon rising, and kiss the ones we love, we are experiencing the best of things already discovered. A need for something to replace these, and by this I mean to subject them to permanent storage, is a little perverse. The enemy would appeal to your sense of boredom and call it being stuck, or worse old fashioned, or the latest, non-progressive. He would say things like “don’t be backward; you are holding up all the discoveries that mankind needs to cure this disease, or that injustice, or solve some impoverishment of a physical nature.”

Yet, when we look carefully over a life of experiences from which most of have gained wisdom, we can clearly see that the basics which God has provided us are by far the best elements of everything we have done. I contend that progress is merely sharing that practical largess with others and teaching them the joy of cooking, the pleasures of a walk by the beach, the stories of the prophets, and the power of fellowship with other good people.

We don’t need special effects in the movies to create a sense of awe if we are truly open eyed about that which surrounds us. Unless we are one bubble off level, we don’t need drugs. Recreational ones like marijuana and alcohol that alter our mood are unnecessary. We certainly don’t need extra marital affairs to “spice up our lives.”

This is an age where we can enhance those basics in new versions by just jumping on the internet and looking up the proper way to make the bouillabaisse, then change it slightly to our taste. The basics are still the value which pays. Consider a faithful, kind, loving spouse, a car that runs, a home that does not leak, good work for our hands and minds, and a true relationship with the God and His Son who gave us all these things.