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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Michael Ahr, I once drew a daily comic strip in college, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned from making boxed macaroni and cheese.
I’m happy to be filling in for Darrell as he enjoys some long-anticipated quality time with his family and fellow Lost fans in Hawaii.
Friday Forum
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I’ve been a listener of this podcast since the very first episode, and I’m honored to be filling in for Darrell. I’ve been listening even before I started podcasting myself for Golden Spiral Media, both with the Dark Matter Extant podcast and the upcoming Agents of SHIELD podcast called “The Sandbox,” both with my friend Dave. He and I have been podcasting since 2012 over at continuumpodcast.com about the Canadian time travel hit, Continuum, and we were inspired in large part by Darrell’s Fringe podcast as well as other television fandom-based podcasts. I hope I can at least approximate the experience he so skillfully shares with us each morning. Honestly, as a podcast listener, I’d never heard anything quite like Stuff I Learned Yesterday and frankly didn’t expect I would WANT to follow a daily inspiration-style podcast. But lo and behold, I find myself listening to SILY every morning during my commute and LOVING it, and now I truly can’t imagine my drive to work without it. Darrell has really done something special here with this podcast and the community he has built around it, and I’ve enjoyed participating in the Friday Forum and listening to everyone else’s stories and sources of inspiration as well.
What I Learned Yesterday:
I grew up with two brothers and a sister, and we all got along really well. During our teenage years, one of the skills we attempted to cultivate was the ability to cook or bake, and each of my siblings and I have carried this talent into our adulthood, each with our own speciality. My older sister, Laura, for example, makes excellent cookies; my twin brother, Casey, is an expert at pizza crust; my younger brother, Carey, is a master at making fudge… and me? Well, I had the good fortune of marrying an excellent cook, so my skills have waned a bit over the years, but I still make a pretty amazing omelet as well as quesadillas, burritos, or pretty much anything filled with meat and cheese. But when we were younger, my brothers and I had a more mundane platform on which to hone our culinary skills: boxed macaroni and cheese.
You know, the one in the blue box with a packet of powdered cheese inside? On the weekends growing up, we often had to fend for ourselves for lunch, and in the days before Easy Mac, the full-sized box was a go-to meal for growing boys. Sometimes we shared, but it wasn’t unusual for us to put away a whole box by ourselves. Not content with the recipe on the box, which often resulted in a soupy, bland meal, my brothers and I would tweak the recipe here and there, adding a dollop of this or that to make the boxed noodles more palatable. We each had our own favorite ingredients: hot sauce, sour cream, parmesan cheese, cayenne pepper, that sort of thing. When we were really hungry, we might even add a can of tuna or some frozen peas to make a cheesy tuna noodle casserole. Some concoctions (which is what we called them) turned out delicious and some turned out completely foul, but each of us eventually settled on our favorite recipe. Mine, disgustingly enough, included a spoonful of Miracle Whip.
So now that I’ve sufficiently grossed you all out with my family’s amateur flounderings in the kitchen – and you’ll notice that my sister was not included in our mac & cheese nonsense although she had other similar experiments with egg salad – I do think this willingness to try different ingredients has turned out well for us in the end. Laura’s cookies are always as chunky as she can make them, with wild but scrumptious combinations like dried cranberry/pistachio/white chocolate chip oatmeal cookies – a favorite of mine. Carey has made all sorts of amazing fudge flavors like s’mores, key lime, and Mayan spicy chocolate. And Casey has tried pizza crusts with Double-0 flour and cornmeal and all sorts of combinations. Their specialties truly are works of art, although I’m sure they leave many failed experiments at home, bringing only the finest example to our family gatherings, but for the most part, they have nearly perfected their craft with consistent results. And even I made an amazing burrito last weekend with chicken sausage, caramelized onions, jack & grana padano cheese, and roasted jalapeno aoli.
I almost feel like this drive to tweak our cooking comes to us honestly through genetics. My dad has a recipe he calls “The Best Chili I Ever Made,” because each time he would make a small change, he would say, “I know I said this last time, but this time I really mean it – THIS is the best chili I ever made.”
Here’s what I learned.
If you want to hone a craft, you have to be willing to fail. Whether you ascribe to the adage “No risk, no reward,” or perhaps the more apt expression for my example, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” it’s definitely true that you won’t get better at anything without putting yourself out there. New bike riders have skinned knees, burgeoning guitar players have sore fingertips – that’s just the way it goes. As long as the failures don’t knock you down and out, you’ll always come back stronger if you’re mentally prepared for mistakes and don’t let them get to you. So take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, and take a chance. Out of experimentation comes innovation.
I’m Michael Ahr, and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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