How to Cook When You Lack The Key Ingredient

So my eldest daughter comes to me this morning and says, "Would you like to do some Fairy cooking?"

Ummmm....

"So, dearest, how do you do Fairy cooking?"

"Well, first you get a Fairy...."

Given our daughter, I was prepared for this to be really gruesome, but thankfully (and surprisingly) it didn't turn out that way.

"...then the Fairy puts its wand on all the things and it makes them really yummy."

Oh, OK. That makes sense. But, this brings up an obvious question:

"What happens if you can't find a Fairy?"

Hmmm, hadn't thought of that. So, I attempted to be helpful:

"Can you substitute a Pixie for the Fairy? Would it still work?"

"Yes. A Pixie would work too."

"Can you substitute an Ogre?"

"No."


...


This little exchange got me thinking, though. In a really odd way, it made me think of the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness.

No, really--stay with me here.

For forty years, they primarily ate manna. Baked, boiled, mashed, fried, pureed, steamed. It's what's for dinner--and lunch, and breakfast, and tea. They were pretty sick of it there for a while. But that's what they ate, until an entire generation--the ones who had known how to cook normal food--had died in the desert. That means that the entire generation of those that entered Canaan had grown up on the stuff, and little else.

Did this mean that the generation that took Jericho and Ai, um... didn't know how to cook? Or rather, they knew how to cook... manna, and not much else. So they had entire recipe books filled with recipes for which God wasn't sending them the main ingredient anymore. I'm imagining the people looking in their cookbooks, and saying, "Hm, this looks good. Have we got all the ingredients? Let's see, goat... dates... pomegranate... coriander... manna. Darn it, we can't make that one either."

I'm just sayin'.

(Well, I had to. Seeing as I'm sitting home from church on a Sunday morning with a sick girl, and using this as an excuse to do blogging, of all things, I figured I need to put something vaguely theological in there....)