Confession: I like to cook. Lorraine likes to cook. We take turns being the sous chef. It’s almost always sweet when Lorraine is head chef and meat when it’s me. Sides and salads are a tossup. This last year we discovered the joys of fried gnocchi and balsamic glaze, welcomed in the same meal, even if not on the same plate. Both are likely old news to a lot of you, but for us, eureka! Here are two new and easy things to cook and eat when we both get home from work.

Another confession: I read the New York Times. I’m still a Christian. Really.

One of the main reasons I read NYT is its cooking section. When the world seems like it’s going in the opposite direction from where I wish it were headed, and news of deaths and disasters begins to overwhelm, I can always scroll down to the cooking section to find something good to cook and eat or just to look at the photos or videos.

Sometimes there is a surprise in the Times. It could be someone talking about the meaning of life or faith, or articles about freedom or suffering or riots or bombs or crashes, but the other morning it was both meaning-of-life and food-related. The headline of Genevieve Ko’s latest caught my eye: “A Creamy Salad Dressing That Will Change Your Life.” She does have a tendency to spiritualize food, such as her “Pork Chile Verde Revives and Restores” first published on Halloween of last year, which means you could cook it in time for All Saints Day. Works for me!

Would I sell my birthright for a bowl of really good soup? Might I get a really good cook to make something I could pass off as my own to get a blessing even if it were trickery? And why are all the big holidays of the Old Testaments called “feasts”? I mean, celebrating pretty much demands food. There does seem to be a link between eating in community and something spiritual.

I don’t necessarily expect food to change my life, but I was curious. Fried gnocchi has been a game changer, and Ko’s gingerbread snickerdoodles or last summer’s favorite corn salad with basil and cilantro have become standbys. I like chili verde, a very comforting dish for me since my youth, and I have come to like ginger in almost anything. But the idea that food can change my life? What was this dressing?

So click I did. It turned out not to be a recipe at all, but a column about Japanese restaurants and chefs in the Los Angeles area who make liquidy dippy substances by mashing tofu with sesame seeds or honey or miso or something else. Ko did her best to make it sound transcendent but…

Not interested. I like protein with the flavor profile of bone and blood that comes with eating meat. Beans and rice, ok, but soy bean curd as life-changing?

I know good food isn’t only at Los Angeles gourmet spots from Japan. The same goes for people…the foolish to confound the wise. What about the bag of castoff vegetables and herb sprigs and skins and peels that I’ve been saving in the back of the fridge? I can empty the bag into the crockpot, add water, cover and set on low, and the flavors of heaven and earth are released in the water, turning the clear liquid into a glorious red or gold or even brown. Amazing flavor emerges. The smell is the smell of home on a Sunday afternoon. You walk through the door and take a breath. Ahhh! I can relax.

Those scraps touch and change anything you make with them. Most people just throw that stuff away—just like so many people in the world seem forgotten and expendable.

I’m pretty much a nobody. I mean, I identify with the broth bag in the fridge. I still have flavor to give even though people might forget me for the exotic tropical fruit or the prime cut of beef or the organic grain-fed chicken. I’m celery leaves, carrot and onion skins, a few leftover mushrooms and whatever that other stuff is. (I think it might be the base of a garlic head, but I’m not sure.) Just dump it into the pot.

A frog goes into a pot of water. The heat comes on and it dies. Not me. Not us.

My Ukrainian friends have taught me that you don’t even need a beet to make borscht.

These castoffs that a lot of people would just throw away, they’re just getting started. There is no death here.

Brothers and sisters following Jesus in Pakistan or Iran or Ukraine or Russia, China or Nigeria or North Korea or Afghanistan—all of us there in the bag for the chef to use. Dump us into the pot filled with living water. We come to life—boiling, steaming—all the flavor God put into us is still there, coming out in the boil, flavoring the water into a beautiful base for all kinds of foods in the days to come. It all smells so mysteriously good. The cooking smell spreads everywhere.

What are you cooking? What’s that smell? I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I came through the door and smelled what you’re cooking. Now I can’t wait for a taste.

Lives that smell and taste good to God are not on the radar of the ways of man. Now that’s life-changing dressing!

For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? (2 Corinthians 2:15-16)