What's stirring?

I enjoy cooking. I love to mix ingredients together in just the right order and in the correct amount. Having the right amount of each ingredient in a recipe is critical to obtaining the taste of what you are preparing for a meal.

Timing is also critical. Being patient enough to let your bread rise fully once and then a second time will lend to a great tasting loaf of bread for your meal. Timing yields rich rewards just like fresh baked bread. As a result of patience and timing, one can enjoy the reward of fresh baked bread floating through the kitchen and the smell itself is almost as good as the taste. However with out the proper techniques this is not possible.

There are the proper techniques for baking, frying, boiling, and grill top cooking. Done correctly and you can produce a delicious array of meals that will keep your family coming back for more. Overall, quality cooking involves having the right ingredients, timing, and techniques to be successful. I want whatever meal I am preparing to have that certain taste or smell that calls out to everyone in my family and makes them hurry to the dinner table. Then I can both enjoy the meal and others joyfully partaking of what I have prepared.

On the flip side is a way of cooking that will not call out to others to join you at the dinner table. If the ingredients are not mixed properly it will ruin the meal you are preparing. Too much time in the oven or not enough will cause you to serve your meal late or have to prepare something else. If you misapply cooking techniques and fry what you should have been baked or boiled what should have been grilled you might get something that is far less appetizing and worse yet not recognizable as food.

There are so many combinations that you can put together to make a quality meal of food; likewise, there are so many ways you can ruin it when trying to cook.

Leadership is a lot like cooking. You can put together a quality recipe, follow that recipe, and produce a wonderful, appeasing meal. Or you can throw together a recipe that has a series of ingredients that don't work together, follow that quick fix recipe to ruin, and produce something both unsavory and hardly edible.

So as leaders we need to be careful of what we throw in the pot. No one wants a leader who can't cook for anyone - much less himself/herself.