During a spring break in which I conducted a 200th birthday concert honoring Felix Mendelssohn, led Paul Marchese’s Batavia High School Varsity Choir in three of my compositions, and gave perhaps my best opera lecture ever for Adventures in Lifelong Learning, my finest hour and most astonishing achievement actually came Wednesday afternoon when I – Gregory Berg – made a batch of chili for that evening’s Lenten Soup Supper. . . and when I say made a batch of chili, I mean that I actually combined ingredients! You have to understand that this is a breakthrough of monumental importance for me, roughly akin to the moment Helen Keller said “Wah Wah” as she felt the water from that farmyard pump washing over her hands. Until Wednesday, I felt like the closest I had come to combining ingredients was pouring syrup on waffles – or spreading peanut butter on a Ritz cracker. But Wednesday, thanks to the recipe given me by Kathy, I had the joy of opening up and dumping into a kettle 6 cans of chopped tomatoes and 6 cans of kidney beans. . . browning 3 pounds of ground turkey . . . dumping in a cup and a half of frozen corn (that was my idea!) . . . and seasoning with chili powder and cumin – and then putting all that into two crock pots for thorough heating through the afternoon.
And the result, amazingly enough, was really good. . . so good that I actually received a couple of compliments rather than warnings from the department of health. And it made me lament the fact that life is way too crazy for me to cook anything beyond a Lean Cuisine, at least when life is humming along at its typical clip. Because creating good food is great fun and so satisfying – even when it’s something as relatively simple (and unruinable) as chili. What must it feel like to create something truly exotic and complicated like Lobster Thermadore? I cannot imagine.