Scott Desgrosseilliers

My Grandmother's Stuffing Tastes Better Than Yours

I’m here to break the news to you that my grandmother’s (Nanny) stuffing is better than yours.  This may come as a shock to you, but I guarantee that no matter how good you think your family’s stuffing recipe is, it can’t top Nanny’s stuffing served each Thanksgiving.

How do I know this?  Is there a way to irrefutably settle a debate concerning taste?  That is where the thanksgiving day stuffing debate gets interesting.  Every year when Thanksgiving rolls around, I tell people it is my favorite holiday.  In the midst of my explanation for why it is the best, I mention my grandmother’s stuffing.  Virtually EVERY time, the person I am talking with interrupts me to say “My <insert family member> makes THE. BEST. STUFFING.”  In years past I would interrogate the person for a list of ingredients in their families stuffing.  Some of the stuffing recipes I heard were downright awful.  Stuffing is not meant to be sweet!  Stuffing does not need to be overloaded with meat, you already have a 20 pound turkey staring at you on the table!

As I rattled off reasons their families stuffing was obviously inferior, my mind would simultaneously register the fact that I had no solid reasons why ours is the best.  What was the secret ingredient?  Is there even a secret ingredient?  Here is the famous Nanny’s Thanksgiving stuffing recipe:

1 loaf Sara Lee bread, left out for 3 days
1 large onion, minced
2 stalks celery, chopped small
4 t margarine
4 t bacon fat
2 ½ c hot water
3 ½ tsp Bell’s seasoning
1/8 tsp pepper
2 tsp salt

I can look at the recipe and notice a couple of distinct ingredients. Bread left out for 3 days is not a common start to stuffing.  Bacon fat wouldn’t normally be found on a kitchen shelf.  And Bell’s seasoning stands out, it is a New England seasoning mix of rosemary, oregano, sage, marjoram, ginger, thyme, and pepper.  Apparently Martha Stewart uses Bell’s as her secret stuffing ingredient also, I wonder if Nanny is getting royalties?

But beyond the ingredients, my informal annual sampling of other people’s opinions of their families stuffings reveals something about taste.  Taste is not an objective measurement.  People’s perceptions of the taste of something is a complex mix of mood, emotion, feelings, and the experience.  Thanksgiving is a happy (for most) celebration of family, and the good feelings and emotions of that time help to color the memory of how good the meal, and your grandmother’s stuffing, tastes.  That is the only rational explanation you could think your family’s stuffing is better than Nanny’s.

Flying a Plane

Time and again I marvel at perception; What the mind believes about an activity is rarely how the actual experience turns out to be.  This was on display again when I flew my first plane last week.

There really isn’t a whole lot to you have to do before you can grab the yoke of a plane.  I took a 3 hour classroom session that described the dynamics of flight back in April.  I never got around to taking my inaugural flight and had forgotten everything in class – oops.  My pre-flight “training” consisted of looking at a national weather website with my flight instructor while he decoded arcane meterlogical script.  The website’s secret weather script would read something like “011107 GS20 NW25 11727”…they could’ve just as easily have said “today there are 20 mph gusting winds from the northeast” but I guess that would ruin the allure and mystique of it all.  After the weather website decoding example I was given a tour of the airplane hangar.  There are some pool tables and a flat screen so that you can hide out from your wife and drink beer pre and post flight.  My flight instructor was a nice enough guy but by the end of the tour I couldn’t help openly making cracks about the pilot clubhouse and he decided to rush me into the plane at that point.

“You’re lucky to be the only one to get in the air today” he told me as we fought our way through the wind to get to the plane.  TheGirlfriend started gripping her passenger seat tightly even though we hadn’t left the ground yet.  My state of the art plane did not have an internal light, so the pilot had to go through the pre-flight checklist with a pen light.  I was too excited to be scared, plus it was absolutely frigid outside so we were at least protected by the elements in the tiny plane.  It was like being in a Toyota Rav-4 with wings and no lights and no upgrades.

The plane finally starts rumbling down the runway.  My instructions are to slowly pull the yoke back once we hit 55 mph.  The instructor also has a yoke so he can override any mistakes I make at the wheel that could cause us harm.  I am still getting used to my surroundings when he tells me its time to pull up on the yoke so I give it a yank.  The plane pops up very easily.  When you are in the cockpit of a small plane, you can feel the force of the wind against the wings a lot easier than a commercial plane – it seems so supported and simple to gain altitude there is no concept of being scared of falling – yet.

We get up to 2000 feet before leveling off.  Flying is easy and fun at this point.  The joy ride quickly ends once we are the recipients of our first wind gust.  Flying a plane is no longer fun.  Unbeknownst to me and, to the best of my knowledge not relayed during my “extensive” ground school, the yoke has around 3 seconds of delay before it responds to the pilot.  When the plane got hit with a sharp gust, it would drop or jump up 20-40 feet depending on how I had my wings.  My reflex would be to move the yoke in the other direction.  So our flight pattern became
1. gust of wind
2. drop 40 feet
3. scott almost rips yoke out of plane trying to avert the seemingly impending nose dive
4. 3 seconds of terror when the plane doesn’t respond
5. plane jerks up
6. rise 40 feet
7. scott pushes down slightly to avert the herky-jerky rise
8. 3 seconds as I realize yet again that the yoke is on delay
9. plane drops 20 feet
10. TheGirlfriend makes a crack about my piloting

My inability to grasp the yoke delay reminded me of how Charlie Brown keeps trying to kick the football because he can’t remember that Lucy is going to pull the ball.  By the time I remembered to be gradual with the yoke my stomach felt nauseous.  It wasn’t a nausea that comes from terror, but more like a seasickness nausea or when you go on a fast roller coaster after drinking until 4am nausea.  I have flown 3 commercially since my flight lesson last week and I scoff when the flight attendant makes seatbelts required.  Turbulence is nothing to me now compared with my wind-swept flight in a Rav-4.

Another spooky moment came when I had to bank a turn away from Chicago.  There were no lights to my left because a left banking turn would put me over lake Michigan.  It was spooky to turn into this black mist with no depth perception, I had to rely on my gauges.  It made it easy to see how JFK Jr could’ve crashed his plane in Cape Cod fog, you literally can’t make out anything when it is dark and over the water.  It is similar to when you are going to sleep in a pitch-black room;  It feels good but without a point of reference your brain can’t seem to shut off and relax.  Of course being tossed around in my Rav-4 I was anything but relaxed already so it didn’t matter much by this time.

I decide I’ve had enough and gladly turn the plane towards the airport.  Descending is tricky.  Pushing down the yoke lowers the nose of the plane, and then a gust of wind would cause it to lower more than I wanted and I’d feel like I was going to nose dive.  Also the winds were coming in strong from an angle, so I was actually flying in diagonally towards the airport, which seems weird.  In actuality I was lowering 20 feet at a time and the instructor got impatient and took over.  I was all flown out anyways and theGirlfriend was anxious to kiss the ground in thankfulness.

I decided to shelve my potential plans to buy my own plane and become a pilot.  The new goal is to buy a share in a plane that comes with its own pilot so I can chill in the back with some vodka tonics and my computer.

Passion Test Results

I took the passion test after attending a The Passion Test workshop and reading the book.  The results were very surprising to me.  Some things that I felt were very important to me didn’t even make my list.  Other passions were listed multiple times in different ways.  And a few passions were shockingly high on my list and will require lengthy explanation.

As a quick review, the passion test is a simple but very effective process for identifying what is most important to you.  Areas that a person feels passionate about are the areas that person should spend their time.  The passion test participant list all important, exciting, and inspiring life goals and experiences.  The list is then compared against itself to find out the top 5-7 things in your life.  This passion list is then used whenever an important decision, choice, or option is presented.  Choose in favor of your passions and your life will improve as you come closer to realizing in your life what is most important to you.

I read the book after attending the workshop.  I was all revved up to take the test.  I made my initial list.  Each item in the list begins with the phrase, “When my life is ideal, I ___“

Here is the list, along with my explanation for why it was a passion of mine:

• I travel the world in my personal jet – this is a passion because I don’t want to waste time when I wish to travel somewhere
• I write new york times best sellers list novels about my life adventures and learnings – I have always enjoyed writing and I have always enjoyed living.  Getting paid large amounts to do that will be a blast.
• I experience perfect love with my wife and family – I don’t have a precise definition of perfect love, I just know what it feels like and I am a big fan.
• I live in luxury residences in Chicago, Colorado, California, and Nantucket. – Spend one season of the year at each place.
• I conduct sold-out practical spirituality workshops worldwide – Teaching someone how to use meditation and self-realization through the Course in Miracles would be an honor.
• I am in perfect health. – Good health is something that doesn’t matter unless you don’t have it, then it is all that matters.
• I am free to spend everyday however I wish. – I like this one a lot.  I hate spending one minute on something I don’t want to do
• I evolve. – Not sure what I mean by this, but I listed it.
• I live like a modern-day Jesus – Ummm, I don’t want to omit what I listed.  I am not religious but this came out while I was free-form listing everything down.  I feel like Jesus was not God’s only son, but one of all the sons who figured out the meaning of life and evolved…I guess this is not the place in this blog entry to delve into this topic, perhaps in the future.
• I live God’s will – Man!  All the religious overtones!  Living God’s will to me is living completely aligned with your true purpose in life everyday.  I don’t understand why God would give someone a talent, then have the person identify and love that talent, and not want the person to live that talent everyday.
• I own a professional sports team – The ultimate indulgence and symbol of success, plus anyone who follows sports thinks they can run a sports team better than the existing team’s owners.
• I have amazing sex everyday – This ends up correlating with experiencing perfect love I think.
• I lead a personal development organization – It is always fun for me to learn and develop new skills.  Running a company or organization devoted to that sounds like a great time.

After I reviewed all of my passions and ranked them against each other, I realized that some of the passions were very complementary, and some passions could be combined to create one strong passion.  I decided, while going through the passion test ranking methodology, that the passion to evolve, live god’s will, and the modern day Jesus thing…could all be combined into living God’s will. 

Here are my passion test ranking results as of November 1, 2007-
1. Living God’s will
2. Experiencing perfect love with my wife and family
3. free to spend everyday however I wish
4. conducting sold-out practical spirituality workshops worldwide
5. writing new york times best sellers list novels about my life adventures and learnings
6. in perfect health
7. have amazing sex everyday
8. travel the world in my personal jet
9. live in luxury residences in Chicago, Colorado, California, and Nantucket
10. own a professional sports team
11. lead a personal development organization

What do I do with this information?  A couple of things.  First I make lists of the top 5-7 passions, in this case I am taking my top 6, and writing them all on notecards to be posted in key spots throughout my apartment to serve as reminders.  Then I create a vision board that gives more visualization help to the passions being achieved.  Passion markers are listed – goals or indications that the passion is being realized in my life.  Every morning I review the passion list so it is kept in mind when I have decisions or options presented – the passion test’s purpose is to choose in favor of these passions when opportunities or decisions must be made, otherwise what is the point?