Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda

My dad should have been a pizza chef. If he was, he would own the most popular pizza restaurant in the country. People would be lining up outside his restaurant just waiting for a bite of one of his famous pies.  Over the years, he has tried many different dough recipes, from the typical flour/yeast/sugar/salt variety to the three day-long process of cold dough fermentation.  He has experimented with many oven temperatures as well as grilling pizza on his barbecue grill.  He has compared pizza pans versus pizza stones, cornmeal versus cornstarch (to prevent the pizza from sticking), homemade versus store-bought sauce and all types of cheeses, toppings and bases/sauces.  

In my opinion, he has it mastered.  Case in point, we were driving to my parents' house on Thanksgiving Eve and were planning to arrive a few hours before dinner.  My parents had discussed a couple different dinner ideas and decided at the last minute to make pizzas.  Although they weren't his fanciest or most time-consuming pizzas -- no garlic chicken pizza with a soy glaze, thinly-sliced roasted rosemary potatoes or finely ground elk meat  -- I think I now have a new favorite pizza.  

He made several pizzas with meat on them for everyone else and then made a special meatless one just for me.  My pizza was a vegetarian pizza with sauteed chopped brussel sprouts, roasted red peppers, toasted chopped hazelnuts and a light sprinkling of mozzarella cheese all on a Chardonnay butter reduction base.  Perfection.  

Best. Pizza. Ever.

[Before I continue, I should note that none of his pizza making or other cooking would be possible without my mom, his sous chef, who cleans up the mess he makes.  While she is also a phenomenal cook, she leaves the pizzas mostly up to him.  She is his partner in the kitchen and in life.]  

I should probably come clean and admit that I am obsessed with brussel sprouts.  I ate almost half of this bowl of brussel sprouts on Thanksgiving (in addition to a TON of other food) and then ate the rest of them right out of the fridge without even taking the time to heat them up.  I would eat brussel sprouts over chocolate cake.  And I really love chocolate cake.  I am just that weird.  

roasted, maple-glazed brussel sprouts

Truth be told, it is a good thing my dad didn't choose to be a pizza chef.  Until his recent retirement, he was an emergency room physician for close to 40 years.  There are thousands upon thousands of people alive and well today because of my dad.  His calming, low-stress demeanor and down-to-earth personality was no doubt extremely comforting to everyone who encountered him in the ER.  I truly couldn't be more proud of him and the profession he chose.  

All of our joking on Thanksgiving Eve about him being a pizza chef instead of a doctor, however, did get me thinking about the choices we make in our lives.  And how we often pick our professions/careers when we are so young and inexperienced in the grand scheme of life.  How many of us would go back and do something different?  And what would we choose?  A job that makes more money?  A position at a non-profit company that we are passionate about?  A career with shorter hours or in a different part of the country?  

I sometimes look at my life -- a stay-at-home-mom to my three kids -- and laugh when I remember the hours upon hours I spent studying financial derivatives in my graduate school class at a top university.  Just yesterday, I was literally scraping my youngest daughter's poop out from under my fingernails.  (Why is it that getting human poop on my hands is more disgusting than when I get my dog's poop on my hands?  And why is it that both of these things happen to me?!)  Looking at my daily life, it would be easy to say getting my MBA was a waste of time and money.

If I could go back in time, though, I am pretty sure I would do it all again.  Or at least the part where I went back to business school.  I might try to find a way to use my finance skills to do something more personally fulfilling like working for a non-profit.  Or perhaps I would try to find a career that was more conducive to having a family and relied less on a typical 9-5, Monday through Friday schedule.  And I'm still hopeful that I'll find a way to use all my skills and education when the time comes.  When the kids are a little older and I am no longer scraping human excrement out from under my nails.  That time will come, right??

Is there anything you would change about your life if you could go back and make different choices?  Would you make the same job and career choices?

***

I really was planning to write about the 10K my husband and I ran on Thanksgiving and our weekend getaway to California.  But that will have to wait for another day!  

- Kristen