"Chocolate," I said.  "We need chocolate."  I spoke with the desperation known only to those who have been without their fix for days.

Rebecca, instead of following me into despair, decided to get creative.  "Okay," she said, one finger to to her lips as she thought.  "Let's make brownies."

In respectable homes throughout the country, the call for brownies is easy to fulfill.  A box of pre-made brownie mix is opened, and all you have to do is stare at the box's image of gooey, chocolate-oozing brownies as you add an egg and a little water.  But ever since Rebecca's accident, money has been a little tight, and we had no boxes of pre-made brownie mix.  Indeed, we didn't even have the proper ingredients called for in our cookbook's brownie recipe.  So we sat down on Google, typed in search parameters that were something like 'brownie recipe that will make my soul melt into a puddle of bliss', hit 'Enter', and looked at the screen with the fervent hope of children.

After scouring through numerous recipes, one stood out among the others.  It called for two sticks of melted butter and only 1/3 cup of flour, so it had to be good. (Butter is the heart-blood of all baked goods.)

The problem was that we still didn't have all the necessary ingredients, so we did our best to make substitutions.  The first problem was a lack of sugar, so we substituted maple syrup from our stores in the basement.  After that, we had to get even more creative, and soon the recipe was tossed aside as we became alchemists in the laboratory, mixing dubious reagents together with zealous glee.  Though we should have known better, we truly believed that brownies would emerge at the end of our labors.

One small step for brownies . . .

What did emerge was. . . interesting.  They had a gelatin-like texture, a strange layer of amber cake on the bottom of the pan (how that came to be we do not know), cute little bubble-marks on the top that made the brownies resemble the surface of some alien planet, and a taste that can only be described as unique.

As we ate them, however, we realized that these brownies were really special.  The were one-of-a-kind.  Nothing like them had probably ever been baked before, and since we had already forgotten the ratios we used in the recipe, they would probably never be baked again.

Actually, a lot of what we cook in our house is like this -- when we've been too long away from the grocery, we'll go through our fridge and dry-goods, piece together a homemade recipe that seems like it might be interesting, and start cooking.  The results are often delicious, sometimes disgusting (think broccoli spaghetti sauce), and always one-of-a-kind.  Such recipes as Whiskey Beef, Candied Garlic Vegetables with Marsala Sauce, and Special Noodle Soup have come into existence, disappeared down into our bellies, and never been heard from again.

Sometimes I wish that there was more of this sort of uniqueness in our culture.  Though a man as wise as Heroclitus said that "You can never step into the same river twice", (and in essence I agree with his observation), we effectively live in a world of repeated experience.  Our candy rolls off of mechanized lines, never touched by human hands, each chocolate bar nearly identical in taste, texture, and appearance.  We watch the same movie over and over, the meals we have at restaurants are often direct imitations of the last meal we had there, and even our daily lives begin to appear the same -- wake up, go to work, come home, watch television, eat boxed meal, go to bed, repeat.  Indeed, we often come to expect and crave this 'sameness', and when something changes, we sometimes recoil and try to scramble back to our familiar world as quickly as possible.

We probably need some of this familiarity to retain our sanity.  But it can be paralyzing, too, if we drink too deeply of it.  It's easy to close the doors to experience so that we end up living in a state of resistance instead of openly embracing change.

Change, after all, is the essence of adventure.  And security is the opposite of adventure.  There's an art to finding a balance between the two, but there's a lot of strange and wondrous experiences waiting for us if we shed a few layers of familiarity.  Try a new restaurant, go for a walk in the woods, go stand barefoot in the snow, or watch a crow fly through the air and take a moment to wonder what its life is really like.  There's a lot of magic out there . . .

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