Two Cooking Philosophies

My wife is a great cook! Over these last twenty five years I have been enjoying her baked goods, fried foods, steamed stuff and curries nestled in delicious sauces. An orderly soul, she is a firm believer in both the effectiveness of internet recipes and the need to get all the ingredients together before cooking. She has tried a variety of internet sites and cooking book authors and settled on the few that have produced tried and trusted favorites. Her dishes are to die for. They are cooked well, presented well and accompanied by a smile on the proud face of the cook.

Her modus operandi is to make a shopping list and head for the grocery store. Once there, she buys what she can get and goes on to more stores until she has everything on her list. She then triumphantly begins to start the job of assembly and fine tuning. Sometimes, actually most times, the shopping is done well in advance as my wife is a very organized person.

I, on the other hand, am a crisis cook. When the call goes out, “I don’t know what to cook and its getting late and we have nothing to eat, and can you fix something!” I swing into action. A quick reconnaissance trip to the pantry and the two refrigerators upstairs and downstairs and I build a battle plan based on what’s out there. Plans are made and discarded rapidly as I spy or don’t spy necessary ingredients. Ultimately (most of the time) I have a final order of battle figured out. With two or three burners blazing, a lot of cursing as I burn a finger or elbow, and a lot of tasting in between, my three dishes are ready for consumption. Quickly clearing the vessels that were no longer needed, I present the dinner with a flourish. Licking my painful fingers, I wave away the compliments, “Oh! It was nothing.”

Therein lies a universal truth- there are some of us who cook to recipe and order and others of us who make lemonade when life hands us lemons. And in the enterprise, it is important to know when you have the luxury of planning and when you don’t.

Too often, our enterprises are in crisis, looking for triage and do not have the luxury of waiting for the meal to be cooked. These crisis interventions look like the need for drastic application system surgery, failure of underlying hardware and software platforms, systems dead in the water, and consequent needs for instant switchovers, denial of service attacks from the other side of the world and failure of the network, to name a few. Our sponsors usually hand us the pink slip when we tell them we need to go shopping or need to stop to make a list or we need time to think.

Too bad, that my wife’s approach works better and produces much more tasty dishes than my crisis oriented battle-plans, but in my defense, we haven’t gone hungry for a while.