Passion is why we persist

I pride myself for being a passionate foodie and amateur chef, but I rarely tackle French dishes. Those recipes always run for three pages long which seemed to be a lot of effort, so I shied away from them.

One benefit of sheltering in place during the outbreak is that it reduces the perceived hurdle of time required in culinary adventures. After running out of my staples, I went French.

I picked out the simplest oxtail stew recipe based on my limited spice selection, and that still took two days.

Day one involved patting dry and browning 3.5lb of oxtails, boiling a whole bottle of fine wine we love (gift from Papa Liang), reducing it, and simmering for three hours with a bunch of vegetables and herbs. After the content cooled down I chilled it in the fridge overnight for the meat to absorb all the flavors.

Day two started with skimming the fat off the solidified content carefully as if performing surgery, boiling the content to further reduce the sauce to just one cup, removing the oxtails to cool down, separating the meat off the bone, returning the meat to the pot to simmer until the juice reduced to a glaze, and finally serving over truffle mashed potatoes, roasted carrots, and olive Fougasse (which took a day for the dough to rise).

I have never made a dish requiring such extended preparation, but to my surprise I actually enjoyed working through the numerous steps of the recipe. And it tasted delicious. While the flavor profile resembled that of beef bourguignon (and pungent Bordeaux), the cartilage of oxtails dissolved into the glaze, creating a even softer texture that melted in my mouth. I knew oxtail tasted good. I didn’t know they could taste this good.

Will I try this recipe again? Absolutely. After going through it once, I know that the steps are not as daunting as I had feared.

Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, once wrote “to persist in the face of continual rejection requires a deep love of the work itself”. It turned out that before his breakthrough with Calvin and Hobbes, Bill lived in his parents basement and made minimum wage by designing grocery ad pamphlets so that he could draw cartoons on evenings and weekends only to be rejected by editors. Most people would have pivoted into a different career. But for Bill, the joy of creating cartoons motivates him, and adversities become merely a part of the process.

I now have a personal interpretation of what Bill said through my culinary breakthrough. Persisting through this dish lifts my hesitance towards complicated recipes. The actual steps to create these delicacies are indeed meticulous but my perception is now different. Before, I viewed the recipes as “too much effort” and turned away from them. Now I accept the effort as a part of process towards heavenly flavors, because I know more than ever that the process of creating heavenly flavors brings joy to my life.

A common trope for millennials and gen Z is we are passionate about almost everything, and I do that too. Maybe a good criteria to identify passion from infatuation is how much we are willing to push through. True passion allows us to enjoy the process. True passion makes us want to persist.