Do You Follow the Rules or Question Them?

Guess my answer...

Hello!

Sunday breakfast is a tradition in my house. We started doing it when my 10-year-old was little, and we've been doing it almost every week without fail ever since.

Over the years we've gone through a half-dozen cooking methods for bacon (baking it in a glass dish, starting from a cold oven, works best for us and requires far less attention than frying), and I've perfected a number of different egg preparations. If you want an omelet, or a poached egg to spread over your toast, I'm your girl. Scrambled, over-easy, or even cloud eggs (where you whip up the whites, fold in some Parmesan cheese, and par-bake in little cloud formations before gently resting the yolk inside and finishing them in the oven). I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.

Another staple of breakfast is a grain of some sort. My sourdough sandwich bread or my husband's delicious family recipe for potato bread make great additions to the table, with nice salty butter and maybe some jam. Bagels with cream cheese or waffles so sweet you can eat them plain.

Pancakes, though, have been my nemesis since childhood. I was too impatient to get them right, and to make matters worse, I didn't want to follow the instructions. This week on the blog I share the unexpected lessons I learned about myself as television chef Alton Brown taught me how to make pancakes. You'll be happy to know that, since that episode, my relationship with pancakes is not only mended but flourishing. If ever you visit my house on a Sunday morning it's likely they'll be on the menu in some form or other. And it's all because I relented to the rules of pancake-making.

Rules are a funny thing. I've always turned my nose up at the adage, "Rules are made to be broken," because that just doesn't make any sense to me. Rules are made because people like to have order in our world and we want to know what to expect from the societal contract we've entered into.

But I think our relationship to rules can easily fall into extremes. Are you the kind of person who follows the rules without much question because you trust there's thoughtfulness behind them? Or do you interrogate and pick apart every little thing in an attempt to uncover the hidden motivations behind them? Or maybe, like me, you're a little of both.

I can't help thinking of the main characters of The Other Women, Lucinda and Emeka, when I think about how society and its rules shape each other. If you read the sample prologue the other week, you have a taste of how the logical progression of society can result in a law that makes sense on its surface but deep down contains seeds of injustice. Emeka is committed to upholding the law, and he's not inclined to question it. But Lucinda was placed in the position of opposing one particular law from the day she was born. When the two come together, they have to work to understand each other as much as they wish they'd never crossed paths. Their journey is intertwined and leads each of them to a new understanding of their role.

Oh, I can't wait until I can share this book with you. Just talking about these main characters gets me all jazzed up again. I hope to have good news to share soon! Until then, take care of yourself.

See you next week!

P.S. Do you know a rule-breaker who would have something to say about all this? Send this email along so they can join our discussions both here and on the blog!

P.P.S. Turns out my children, while complete opposites, are also just like me. One just reads the ingredient list and throws everything together, and the other needs to have step-by-step instructions for everything she makes. Both are pretty good cooks, with some supervision. If you'd like any of the recipes I mentioned above, reply here and let me know. If there's enough demand I'll transfer them from the Notes app in my phone into a little e-book for you!