About five years ago my partner lost his job. It was summer and I wasn’t teaching. We had no money in the bank and we had to survive on less than half of what we normally lived on. At that time we’d gotten accustomed to eating out. I didn’t want to stop eating my favorite foods and I didn’t know how to cook some of them. I was also afraid that they’d be super expensive, because after all, they were so expensive to eat out.

There were some things I had been afraid to try like Indian food and sushi and Chinese food. I thought there would be no way to master these cuisines. I thought they were high art. I was right; in a way they are. They’re the high art of everyday people like you and me. What I underestimated was my ability to be a high artist.

Indian was my favorite and the one I would miss the most if I couldn’t eat out. I was intimidated by the spices, by the fact that I’d been raised in an Irish/Italian household. I told myself I hadn’t the experience, the training or the cultural background to make the food I loved most. If you pay attention here you’ll see that I’m not really talking about cooking at all. I’m talking about life. I was denying myself the right to do what I wanted, to create what I really wanted to create, to be who I wanted to be.

By this time I had mastered masala tea. It was a drink I loved so much that I had to learn to make it. At first I thought it was completely beyond me but I was so in love with the brew that I started poking around Indian markets and found a boxed masala mix and a loose tea that smelled like the one I drank in restaurants. My first experiments were pleasant enough, but they were missing something. I asked a few waiters at Indian restaurants how they made it. Two of them actually took me into the kitchen and showed me how they did it. In time I began to vary the recipes, to perfect them to my taste. I began to make my own spice mixes. Now I have different blends for different moods: what I thought would be impossible to master is now second nature to me. I wanted the knowledge, asked for it and got it.

But even though I had mastered tea I still underestimated myself. I thought the cuisine was so far beyond me. Still, we were living on limited funds so I had to figure out how to make it myself if I wanted to eat it. I started small. I bought papadum, these crispy lentil wafers that you fry in oil. Turns out restaurants just bought these and fried them the way I did. I suddenly had the makings for an Indian afternoon tea. Masala chai and papadum. While we were struggling I made this inexpensive tea spread for us often. It gave us reasons to celebrate during a very difficult period and gave me the confidence to try more. I bought a book on Indian cooking and I stocked up on some of the spices listed in the back of the book. Turned out they weren’t expensive at all which was perfect for what we were going through.

The book wasn’t much help though and my first experiments were less that satisfying. Some of the Indian cook books out there are just awful. But I stuck with it, because I knew that cooking, like most things in our lives, is just a process. I knew this: I’d been cooking since I was a little kid. The information had to be out there somewhere.

I found a great book that guided me through the Indian markets. Suddenly I felt empowered. I studied the book and went to my local Indian market and started to ask questions. Here’s something we all forget. People love to share what they know. They love to be in the role of expert. They love it when someone asks them to share their experiences. Everyone is walking around saying “Me, me, me.” And, “Look what I did…” They love it when someone asks about their experience. I approached the market owners with genuine enthusiasm and they opened up to me began to tell me things I wanted to know. I saw a video of some of the cooking techniques and I started to put the pieces together. In a years time I was making dishes that we could have gotten at our favorite restaurants. I realized that Indian cooking is very easy, energy efficient and inexpensive. My partner would sigh contentedly when he’d scoop up a fragrant spoonful of butter chicken or saag paneer. Around this time a friend of ours gave us some goat from her farm. I’d gained enough confidence and learned enough about the spices that I made a fierce rogan gosht.

Everything I was learning came together when one of the market owners said to me: I don’t use recipes: I just throw whatever is spicy in there. I gave myself the permission to start experimenting. I realized that I preferred spices like fenugreek and hing and coriander and so started spicing my dishes this way whenever I could. Once I was comfortable with all this I began to look at the medicinal properties of the food. As a student of Tibetan medicine I became very interested in how the spices would effect us. This brought another level to my cooking: using food as medicine rather than over the counter pills.

By this time I figured if I could do Indian food why not sushi? Why not Chinese? I began cooking these foods with great success too. I went back to my Italian roots and revisited old favorites with greater knowledge and skill. Something else began to happen. I began to notice that A) I no longer cared whether or not I could eat out because I could make everything at home B) These cuisines cost very little to make and so my food budget was cut in half. C) I was being creative and self reliant in ways I didn’t know were even possible. The cuisines don’t matter: fact is I like Indian food, Chinese food, sushi etc, but not everyone does. The point is: it was something that seemed impossible to tackle and I tackled it. How often do we turn away from challenges like that? How often does it take a crisis to make us push past that fear?

Over that year I grew in ways that I never would have if we hadn’t been put in that awful financial bind. I learned things about myself and my capabilities that I never would have. Had we never felt the bind I would have remained complacent and never moved out of my comfort zone. I would have told myself that these processes were too big for me to master and kept spending hundreds of dollars buying food in restaurants that I could make for pennies at home.

Let’s all think about this as we face the challenges we’re facing every day. How are the difficulties in your life forcing you to expand? To move out of your complacency? To become bigger than you ever could without them.

This little shift in perspective could change your life forever. I know. It did mine. Cheers!

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