Learning to be consistent. In cooking and in life.

I am a Food Network junkie. It is usually what we have on in the evenings. (So much so that my son, who is two and a half, knows most all of the Food Network chef’s and asks for them by name…) One of my new favorite shows is Restaurant: Impossible. It is a lot like Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, but without all the swearing.

On one episode, Chef Robert Irvine had the kitchen staff, four people in total, cook him the same dish off the menu. Each of them was to cook it the way they would serve it, without communicating with one another. The result? Each person cooked it a different way. The chef’s point was this: if a person comes into the restaurant and orders a dish they want it cooked the same way every time. Because there was no communication in the kitchen (no head chef) there was no consistency to the meal. Success can not be built in that way. It made a lot of sense to me.

I posted a few weeks ago about a disaster I had in the kitchen. You can read about it here. I made a dish called Pasta Carbonara. It is a delicious fettuccine meal that has bacon pieces in a cream sauce. I made it again last night, and atoned for my sins a few weeks ago. While making the dish last night I realized something. I used the wrong recipe a few weeks ago. (I even linked the wrong recipe in my last post…I couldn’t believe it!) I used the wrong blasted recipe! How do I expect to get the same results if I don’t follow the same steps…or at least use the same ingredients?!! It was a lesson in consistency for sure.

This lead me down the path of thought even further. This is one of the lessons I have been learning over the past few months. Learning to be consistent. I am finding it is the path to greater achievement. This has been true in blogging, building relationships, exercising, working, and just about every other area I can think of.  You can’t go to the gym sporadically and expect to build a perfect physique. You can’t spend random time with your spouse and expect for your marriage to be perfect. You can’t expect the dish to come out perfect if you don’t follow the recipe the same way every time. To build (or cook) things of quality and lasting value, you have to be consistent.

It sure makes things taste better when you are.