Cookin’ Up Stress Relief

Ever had one of those days coming up at work where you have to do something that scares the bejeebers out of you?

When I’m not romping around with horses and dogs, I create training materials and train employees on how to use the new corporate software we are rolling out to replace our old legacy system.

Yawn. I know.

Previously, I’ve been training people in Manufacturing, using Word documents. But now that I’m training Customer Service and redoing other materials for a software upgrade, the company decided to purchase software to help me develop interactive training that can be used for self study as well as instructor led classes.

Anyway, now that you have that little bit of boring background, here’s the nervous part. The company who sold us this training development software, a rather gigantic company, was having a sales meeting and invited my boss and I to come talk about why we bought the software and how we are using it.

I didn’t actually know I was going to a sales meeting. I thought we were doing some little podcast in a room with a couple people, which I was nervous enough about. But when we arrived, I saw there was a big table of food, a webcast setup that people around the world were signing in to, and there were about 60 people in the room attending in person.

My boss and I sat on stools at the front of the room, the VP kicked off the meeting, and my boss and I took turns answering questions.

I think we done good. I even made people laugh a couple times. It was, dare I say, almost fun. And hey, I received a man’s large shirt with the company logo on it for participating. Cool…

But all that nervous energy kind of sticks with me for awhile.

When I got home, I cooked, which is kind of funny because cooking kind of stresses me out. But that’s only when I cook for other people. When I cook for myself, I love it. How things end up is always a surprise and this recipe was no different.

I skimmed the recipe and bought a few ingredients over the weekend that I didn’t have on my shelf. But as usual my skimming made me miss a lot of details. Who would have thought that you could possibly need a FULL cup of basil leaves?! Does this container look like it held enough?

Obviously not. So I threw in a little oregano. Hey, it was green, it was another kind of leaf, how off could it be?

But the “pesto” was very unpesto-textured, but it tasted okay, not like pesto, but interesting. And the cheese was supposed to go into the food processor to make pesto but which cheese? Just the parmesan, which is what it sounded like.

Or the ricotta too, which according to the recipe I was supposed to fold into the beans, tomatoes, pasta shells, pesto, and broth mixture.

And the bread crumbs. Were they supposed to be dry? I only had a loaf of fresh bread so I used that. A cup didn’t seem like enough and I should have added more because the crunchiness after baking did add a lot to the flavor.

So many ingredients! And complicated. I didn’t end up eating until 8:00.