Opinion: Like the best food, recipe for a good life needs the right ingredients

Cooking is something I enjoy doing. And I have hundreds of recipes and I don’t know how many cookbooks. Let’s just say that I have so many that I figure I will have to live at least 50 more years to try all the recipes.

I especially enjoy making pound cakes and then giving them away as “just because” gifts. It never ceases to please me when I see the smile of gratitude on the faces of the recipients of one of my cakes. I am always thankful that I made somebody’s day with my small gesture of kindness.

However, every now and then, I make a mistake in one of my recipes - I leave something out or I don’t put something in. Sometimes the spices are not to my taste.

Once I made a dirty rice recipe with ground beef, onions, bell peppers Cajun seasoning, chopped garlic, the works. When it was done it looked like a masterpiece. “Just call me Chef Bea,” I thought to myself.

However, what should have been a savory dish turned out to be a complete failure. It tasted terrible. I was baffled. I had followed the recipe precisely. Now, I am not one for wasting stuff, especially food. But if it didn’t taste good to me, I didn’t think anyone else would like it. So, I threw the whole batch into the garbage can.

I went back over my recipe, ingredient by ingredient. I did everything right. After backtracking, I finally figured it out; one of the ingredients didn’t match the rest. It was a spice that I don’t particularly like and hardly ever use. I didn’t think it belonged in the recipe, but I included it in the recipe anyway and it ruined my dish. Instead of the taste being savory and mouthwatering, it tasted horrible.

The same thing happened a few days ago. This time it was with a pound cake. I had the recipe figured out in my head. My plan was to tweak an old, basic pound cake recipe with some new ingredients and come up with a cake that would outshine all the others I’d ever made.

Not.

While I added the new ingredients, this time I had left out a very important one: my cake batter needed more flour. I was so disappointed. The house had been engulfed with the wonderful aroma coming from my kitchen. It smelled like a house filled with love.

I had promised my friend Mae a piece when it was done. This was one of my “trial cakes.” I’d never made this one before. But I was sure that it would be as delicious as I imagined.

Not only did the cake stick to the pan (I’ve never had a problem turning my cakes out of the pan) it flopped so bad that it looked like an oversized pancake with a hole in the middle.

As I pondered over why these two recipes had failed, I thought about life. Living a good life is like following a good recipe. If we fail to put one necessary ingredient into our life - like love - we can make a big mess of things. Love is necessary for us, as humans, to live a fulfilled life.

We must add to love a good dose of compassion, patience, forgiveness, faith and not thinking more highly of ourselves than we should. We can’t live a truly good life without these ingredients.

You may know someone who is living high on the hog, so to speak, without ever showing compassion or love to his/her fellow humans. They may have all that money can buy - fancy cars, houses and the latest fashions. But if you take a closer look at that person, you probably will find that there is something lacking. Something like inner peace, contentment, patience and heartfelt respect for others.

I’m not saying that it takes a poor person to have the above qualities to live a good life, a life of service, of kindness, of giving. I know too many rich people who live selflessly, always finding a way to help make somebody else’s life better. These people have found the right recipe.

When my dirty rice and pound cake recipes didn’t work I had to go back to the drawing board to find out what happened. It is the same way with life. Very often, things just don’t seem to work out for us, even when we think we have done all the right things.

In my case, I have learned that if I don’t start my day with prayer and thanksgiving, things just don’t seem to go right. My prayer time and thanksgiving to the Lord is a very important ingredient in my life.

But even when I start my day with prayer and praise, things sometime go awry anyway. When this happens, I have learned to pause and take a look at my life recipe to see what is lacking. I often find that, yes, I can tweak my life recipe by adding more kindness, more gratitude, or even a little more humor to my day.

And while my life may still be filled with rivers to cross, hurdles to jump over and problems to be solved, I find that things go more smoothly when I tweak my life recipe with the right ingredients.