In the film ‘Bruce Almighty’, the story starts with a news reporter called Bruce Nolan who is dissatisfied with his life because he feels he’s going nowhere and isn’t getting the big stories he wants to cover. The film starts with a scene showing a typical ‘local’ story: Bruce reporting on a bakery which is going for a record on baking the biggest cookie. No one really cares about this particular record and even the bakers are not particularly good at being enthusiastic about it! It symbolises the pointlessness which is dogging Bruce and how he feels insignificant and worthless.
Making a huge cookie, though, requires a lot of ingredients, and anyone who has done batch cooking or made a meal for a large number of people in one go knows that a lot of ingredients are needed to cook for lots of people. In 1996, Cookie Time Limited[1] took the world record for the biggest cookie, which was:
- 15 m2 in area
- 9 m2 in diameter
- 5 cm thick
And it contained:
- 13 tonnes of ingredients, including:
- 5 tonnes of chocolate (over 1 million chocolate chips
- 1 tonnes of sugar (enough for 1 spoonful of sugar in 600,000 cups of tea)
- 2 tonnes of butter (enough for over 400,000 slices of toast)
- 24,000 eggs
- 5 tonnes of flour
To take any kind of cooking record like this requires a huge amount of ingredients and it can be very hard to work through the implications such cooking requires. You need bigger pans and ovens if you’re going to do it all at once, for example!
But essentially, batch cooking is not that difficult once you make the adjustment and take into account what you are trying to do. You simply have to multiply the ingredients you’d make for one cookie and make adjustments for timings for cooking.
I feel a bit like a batch cooker when we are looking at the psalms of thanksgiving. There is just so much material in the Psalms alone – let alone the rest of the Bible! – that it is easy to feel overwhelmed, but we need to look at it psalm by psalm, theme by theme, simply working through the many reasons the psalmists give for thanking God. The old joke says: ‘How do you eat an elephant?’ and the answer is ‘one bite at a time.’ In the same way, we study the psalms, theme by theme, and find so much in them which teaches us how to pray.
[1] http://www.cookietime.co.nz/wbc.html