As an avid amateur baker and an enthusiastic eater, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen thinking about food. And when I’m not in the kitchen I can often be found curled up in bed with a good cookbook. My wife is much the same as me in this regard. She prefers cooking to baking, but she nonetheless loves not only eating food but reading about it and meditating on it. As a result of the countless hours we have spent thinking, reading, and talking about food, Julie and I have learned that there are many ways in which culinary truisms can serve as helpful metaphor for other avenues of life.

Consider for instance the phenomenon of oven spring. Yeasted breads generally rise at least a couple of times before they enter the oven. Yet, if the yeast is any good, the bread will also get one last rise inside the oven. The heat in the oven causes the gas inside the bread to expand until finally the crust hardens and stops any further growth. Thus bread continues to expand until the moment the yeast inside it exhales its last breath. We humans ought to learn from the example of the humble loaf of bread and continue to expand our minds until the hour of our final breath. Past the age of eighteen, few of us are likely to grow any taller or better-looking. But we should never stop trying to grow smarter. If a yeasted bread doesn’t rise after it hits the heat of the oven, it isn’t likely to be any good. Likewise, a human being who stops learning after he leaves school, or after he’s achieved some success in life, or after he retires from the workforce, will never reach his full potential. Remember the phenomenon of oven spring and try to keep expanding your mind for as long as you are breathing.

A lot of excellent foods benefit from a little decay. Some baking recipes call for sour milk. The best French toasts and bread puddings are made with somewhat stale bread. When making banana bread or banana muffins, bananas that are brown and mushy are generally preferable to fresh yellow bananas. Steaks made from dry aged beef are more tender and flavorful than steaks made from newer, fresher cuts of meat. And cheeses and wines, of course, are famous for improving with age. If you are young and tend to scoff whenever you see some middle-aged person still struggling to find herself, still pursuing some impossible dream – an acting career, a Ph.D., a recording contract – well past the age when most people have given up their dreams, don’t be too quick to judge them a failure. Remember some things are improved by a little age and decay.

Avocadoes can’t ripen on the tree. They have to fall, or be plucked, from the branch before the fruit can mature sufficiently to become soft and mellow and tasty. Ideas are a bit like avocadoes: they cannot come to fruition if you keep them fixed to the tree – i.e., the brain that gave birth to them. A hard unripe avocado will ripen more quickly if it is placed in a bowl with ripe avocadoes. All fruits, as they ripen, give off gases that promote the ripening of the other fruit around them. Likewise, ideas that you keep to yourself are unlikely to produce great results. It is when we engage in a free exchange of ideas with others that our ideas are most likely to bear perfect fruit. Don’t store up ideas in your head. Shake them loose and let them mingle with the ideas of others.

Professional chefs always urge home cooks to zest citrus fruits right over the bowl into which they plan to mix the grated pieces of rind. If you’re going to add some orange zest to a pancake batter, grate the orange right over the bowl. As you grate an orange or a lemon or a lime, you release aromatic oils from the fruit. If you grate the fruit on a wooden cutting board and then dump the grated rind into your batter, much of the citrus oil will get soaked up into the cutting board and be lost to you. This culinary lesson could serve as a metaphor for writers trying to capture the essence of real life in their work. Don’t focus relentlessly on just one aspect of life – i.e., its darkness or its sweetness. Do your grating over the bowl and capture both the rind and the essence of human experience.

A loaf of yeasted bread will get its largest rise first. Each subsequent rise will be a little smaller. But do not be tempted to bake the bread after that first rise. The dough may be large but it won’t yet be very flavorful. The first rise tends to fill the dough with too much air. A loaf of bread is better once it has had some of its hot air punched out of it. This is also true of people. Often times, especially early in life before they have tasted of humility and defeat, men tend to get big-headed and full of themselves. Men in this stage of life are generally not very interesting. Once they’ve had the wind knocked out of them a few times, men – and loaves of bread – tend to develop much more complex and interesting characters.

It is easier to separate egg whites from egg yolks if the egg is cold. But it is easier to blend the two together if the egg is warm. This is a good metaphor for marriage. If you are cold towards your spouse, don’t be surprised if you are soon parted from her. If you’d like to merge her path through life with yours, be a good egg and always treat her with warmth and kindness.

Unless you have a restaurant-grade oven, you should rotate the cookie sheet mid-way through the baking of every batch of cookies. Most standard ovens have hot spots and cool spots. If you leave the cookie sheet unturned, cookies at the back of the oven may overcook while those near the front of the oven may not harden enough. Likewise, it is never a good idea for a human being to remain too firmly rooted to one particular spot, one lifestyle, one belief system, one comfort zone. Unless you move around a bit and try on a few new philosophies every now and then, you run the risk that your intellect might harden in place, or that your thoughts will never really coalesce at all. Don’t be content to let the cookie sheet of life remain in the same spot. Every now and then it’s a good idea to open up the oven and give it a turn.

Parchment paper is one of the miracles of modern life. It can withstand oven temperatures of up to 500 degrees without burning or even smoldering. What’s more, you can remove it from a 500-degree oven with your fingers and not be burnt. Somehow it has the ability to withstand heat and not absorb any of it. Space shuttles ought to be wrapped in the stuff. Every now and then, when a noisy neighbor keeps me awake at night or a rude driver cuts me off on the freeway and I find myself burning with a desire to burst into avenging flames and attack my tormentor, I find solace in thinking about the humble sheet of parchment paper with which I often line my cookie sheets. It sits there inside a 350-degree oven with cookie dough hardening on top of it, but the parchment retains its cool. It comes out of the oven as cool as it went in. And the same piece of parchment can often be used three or four times without sustaining any visible wear or tear. So, the next time you feel yourself growing angry at one of life’s little annoyances, think of the humble sheet of parchment paper that facilitates the development of wonderful baked goods without ever becoming a baked good itself – and stay cool!

The constraints of column space preclude me from listing all the life lessons that Julie and I have learned while fixing a feast together in the kitchen – or while perusing cookbooks together on the living room couch. If you are an avid home cook, you probably already know just how many kitchen truisms have applications in the world beyond the kitchen door. If you are not a home cook, I advise you to get hold of a few simple recipes and then venture into the kitchen and start preparing a meal for yourself. In time, you may learn not only how to poach an egg or truss a chicken, you just might also learn how to live a more fulfilling life as well.