Mise en place.
In the kitchen, the phrase is used as a noun (i.e., the setup of the array of ingredients), a verb (i.e., the process of preparing) and a state of mind.
There is something meditative about making stuffing. Or so I learned the other day on the first Thanksgiving that I had attempted anything outside of my mashed potatoes and cranberry relish comfort zone.
It’s actually much easier to make than I had anticipated. (Which may have had something to do with believing that Bon Appétit wouldn’t lie when it promised that “simple is best”.) All the recipe asked of me was to be well prepared, follow the steps in the right order, and trust that it would taste as good as it was starting to smell by the time I folded the eggs and remaining stock in before carefully transferring everything to the pre-buttered baking dish.
As I stood chopping celery, parsley, sage and rosemary, I couldn’t help but feel like maybe I was supposed to be noticing something. (I also couldn’t help but worry that the results wouldn’t be the same with dried thyme but I had to let it go… you get what you get at the grocery stores here and my one lucky item had been scoring two bags of fresh cranberries after Joe’s three trips to two stores.)
Life has been pretty life-y since we got here 5 months ago. It’s been one thing after another and I’ve been feeling like I’m constantly on the defensive rather than getting out ahead or even thinking about taking the time to do so. That is to say, I have NOT be in a mise en place state of mind.
But as I prepped my ingredients and measured out the gobs of butter, I wondered if maybe that could start to change now that we’re essentially fully settled in (aside from getting our art up on the walls).
The term has also been used outside of cooking: psychologists Weisberg, et al., used the phrase to refer to "how one's stance towards a given environment places constraints on what one feels able to do within that environment, and how these assessments and predispositions impact the process of preparing to act." They used the term in a study of how a school became safer after security measures — like metal detectors and bars on the windows — were removed, leading to the unexpected outcome.
It would be lying to say that I have learned to love it here. I’m not there yet (and, quite frankly, I haven’t been able to convince myself that I’ll get to that point). But I’m trying to make the best of being here. now.
And since the immediacy of figuring out how to just get by is gone, I’m realizing I have a chance to take stock of what it is that I’m trying to accomplish and then do my best to set myself up for that to happen.
There’s a lot that I want in the next five weeks before the calendar’s pages turn to 2022.
My normal M.O. would be to rush headfirst into the tasks at hand, ticking them off one-by-one and whacking the moles that would feel unexpected but probably shouldn’t (especially here). But I think I might have just a little more luck if I step back and learn the lesson from the stuffing: a few beats of planning and prep can actually make all the difference not only in the results but also in getting there.
So I’m doing just that: fighting the urge to plow through because there’s only five weeks left in the year and sitting for a moment to observe and really intuit what it is that I need. And, more importantly, what I really want.
***
P.S. The stuffing, by the way, was delicious.
(Of course it was.)
Mise en place definitions on Wikipedia
