Better on Paper

My family got together a few weeks ago to make ravioli for Easter. We gathered on a Friday night, ate pizza, and then rolled up our sleeves to get to work with flour and eggs, rolling and filling.

Much like pierogie-making, which my family also does, we’ve made different stations to making ravioli. There’s kneading, rolling the dough into long noodles, filling, traying, freezing, and it all starts with making the dough. But the dough is temperamental, so everyone avoids the dough station. We once stuck a newbie there and left her on her own to figure it out. She did. But regardless of who’s working that station, it usually takes about three batches before we really have a working system where the bulk of the flour gets incorporated. Though, my sister the Home Ec teacher, looked at the ingredients and said, “With all these eggs, this dough should be very forgiving,” meaning, you really can’t screw it up (unlike dough involving butter, which a person can mess up just by blinking wrong in the butter’s direction). But, for the most part, my sister is right. The dough might look a giant mess in the beginning but you can usually get it to work.

So, that Friday after pizza, everyone gathered in the kitchen and they were all suddenly intent on listening to me (why me, I don’t know). But sensing their readiness for a presentation, I tried to demonstrate how to make this dough, which was, inevitably, a disaster. Everyone was staring at me and at the mixer, which was kicking out flour in heaps and globs as the dough refused to cooperate. I was helpless to do anything but stare and stammer. At one point, I started willing the dough with my eyes to just work so we could finally get on to the next of several steps we had ahead. Finally, everybody moved on, which was good because I’d forgotten the next step—kneading—altogether; I hadn’t even set up the station for it. (By batch three, though, we definitely had everything working, just like clockwork…)

When the pressure was off and everyone moved to the filling station, which is where they naturally congregate because it’s fun and there’s a lot of down time between long strips of noodle coming off the rolling station, it finally occurred to me that you can’t will the dough into submission any more than a writer can force words to line up on the page. Think about it: If you try to force a recipe, it flops. Ingredients don’t blend, the texture is off; the flavors don’t work. The same is true with writing. When you try to make your writing do something it doesn’t want to do, the reader can feel it. It’s discordant; it sounds off. At that point, you pretty much have two choices, in the kitchen and with your paper and pen. Option One: Turn your attention elsewhere. When you circle back around you’ll see the answers right in front of you. It’s a great editing trick and I should have used it when everyone was staring at me. I could have, for instance, presented a quick review of all of the stations and then invited everyone to land at the station they liked best (again, if I hadn’t forgotten about kneading). A station review would also have bought some time for Option Two: Slow down and stick with it. But truly, slooow down, keep working. One word at a time, one clump of flour at a time, it’ll begin to incorporate and things will start working. The upside to writing is I can retell the story any way I want. Next time I’ll have more of a hero role or maybe there’ll be a sword fight.

Now, if this were just a story about ravioli with a metaphor on writing it could end here. But this is a story about redemption. At some point after the dough trauma, I remembered an old idea I’d had about starting my own cooking show on YouTube. Yes, I put those words in a sentence together: Me, cooking show. It’s a fun idea I kick around on paper. I wouldn’t be completely out of my element; you must also understand that I come from a family that is well versed in the kitchen. My Mom’s baking has been known to stop wars. My Dad can slow cook dinner starting at nine in the morning and by noon you’re salivating so badly you break into the kitchen to taste everything. My sister, the Home Ec teacher we met earlier in this writing, used to make pizza for my high school friends back when she was still in elementary school, and everyone would wait two hours for this pizza because my sister started with flour and water and made her own pizza crust.

As for me? Well, things tend to totally fall apart when I’m in the kitchen, sure, but I’m pretty good at cleaning up a mess. And that’s kind of the beauty of the cooking show idea, at least on paper, which is about all the ways things can go wrong and how you can fix them and salvage your dish in the final minutes before your guests arrive. I even have a couple of episodes listed out: Exploding Water; Forgetting the Cheese; Microwaving Lasagna When A Burnt Potato In the Oven Sets Off the Fire Alarm and It’s Not Even Your House; and now I can add Cranky Ravioli Dough In Front Of The Whole Family to the lineup.

Sometimes “the last thing you should do” is the first thing you should entertain when left to your own devices. Play to your strengths. Daydream big.

Time will tell if I get around to making some cooking episodes. Until then, I’m much better on paper. At least, for now.