Catholic Husband

Love / Lead / Serve

Not from Scratch

I woke up at my normal time on Saturday morning, went for my walk, came home, and got ready for the day. I walked into the kitchen at about the same time that I normally do each morning. The only difference from any other weekday on that cold December morning is that my whole family was still fast asleep in their warm beds. I pulled out a box of muffin mix and spent twenty minutes baking a dozen fresh blueberry muffins.

The mix was less than $2 at the grocery store, and the directions consisted of me putting paper muffin liners in the muffin pan, mixing three ingredients with a spoon, and putting the whole thing in the oven. I didn’t have to wake up before dawn to pull off this fresh breakfast, nor did I use an old family recipe. It was a simple deviation in my schedule that put a delicious treat on our Saturday morning breakfast table.

It’s easy to feel paralyzed when you want to do something nice for your family. Between HGTV, the Food Network, and all of your social feeds, you’re inundated with perfection, made from scratch projects and food dishes. Maybe you’ve even tried in the past to treat your family with something from one of those shows or pictures, only for your final project to look not at all like theirs.

Perfection is mythology; don’t need to reinvent the wheel just to do something nice for your family. A box of muffin mix after baking results in the same end product as pulling out eight different ingredients to make them from scratch. When you sit down at the table, you’re eating a muffin. The point is that you baked muffins, not how you put the batter together.

Life is complicated enough. Making an effort is what’s important. Make the effort.