I have recently taken up baking and have found that I truly enjoy it. I love choosing a recipe, gathering the ingredients, measuring them carefully, combining them, shaping them, putting the pans in the oven, and then enjoying the tasty results that seem to have been created by magic.
I am no stranger to cooking. My husband and I love to cook, and we take turns making dinner whenever we are both home at dinnertime. We do a lot of sauteing and stove-top cooking, including grilling (our stove has a grill), stir frying, pan frying, pasta cooking, and so on. Sometimes we prepare roasts and casseroles, but most of the time we cook on the stove.
I recently had an epiphany about baking and the reason that I enjoy that process so much and find it so satisfying. When you bake, you do the “work” of the cooking up front, and then you put things in the oven and let them go. You let the oven take over, and the baking process do its thing.
The dynamics of stove-top cooking are quite different. When you cook on the stove, you are active most of the time. You do a larger share of the “work” of the cooking, and you do it at the beginning, middle, and end of the cooking process. You stir the pans, you add more ingredients, you take things out of the pans, you participate in various steps pretty much all along the way.
I think that I find great satisfaction and joy when I bake because baking requires that I let go, that I let things happen rather than make things happen. Instead of doing all of the cooking, I do the parts that I can do and I give over the rest of the process to the magic that happens in the oven.
What an apt metaphor for so many aspects of life. Do what you can and then give yourself over. There is magic waiting to happen.