Expect Foam

My roommate and I have similar diets, so we often share ingredients and cooking duties.

However, my roommate and I don’t share similar shopping habits, so things can get interesting.

I tend to buy the exact same items over and over again. Pasta. Ground beef. Chicken. Rice. Bell peppers. Chocolate. Coffee.

That’s pretty much it.

And not only do I buy the same items, but I also buy the exact same brand and size. Unless it’s a holiday or I’m feeling really whimsical, my grocery cart rarely varies from one week to the next – partially because I’m a creature of habit and partially because I am all about decreasing the number of decisions I make in everyday life.

My roommate, on the other hand, likes to try new things. She might buy pasta two weeks in a row but get two different varieties. If she sees a new flavor of something, she will try the new one instead of buying the flavor she already knows she likes. New flavors of pasta? Seems odd, but why not? New healthy-looking snack? Gotta try it!

This means that sometimes when I cook with her ingredients I find myself using something I haven’t even heard of.

Most recently: pasta made from lentils.

If you have ever been around me in the kitchen, you know I strongly dislike reading recipes or instructions, but when something is brand new I maybe sometimes somewhat read what I’m supposed to do with it.

Well, this box had your standard pasta deal (boil 87 gallons of water for 2 cups of pasta, cook for 3-17 minutes, drain and eat immediately or risk all of it becoming one solid, inseparable mass) with one notable add-on: “Expect foam.”

Two words. Expect. Foam. Not complicated or really that surprising conceptually, but not something I’d ever read on a pasta box before.

The company that made these noodles out of lentils test cooked them, saw the amount of foam created by the legumes disintegrating, and thought, “Let’s warn them so they don’t end up with foam everywhere and never use our pasta again because of the mess.”

Isn’t that remarkable?

We always have expectations. We can’t help it, it’s part of how our brains are wired.

And because of the way the world works, our expectations are not always met. Maybe it’s a conversation that turns unexpectedly into an argument, a routine health check-up that turns unexpectedly into a diagnosis, or a new pair of shoes that are more uncomfortable than expected. Sometimes our expectations feel vitally important, other times not.

And it’s remarkably rare to receive the proper warning of what to expect. When we introduce friends to new things, we forget what we didn’t know and don’t warn them about every step of the process. When we enter into a conversation we’re sometimes so focused on what we’re going to say that we forget to warn the other person we’re about to go deep. When we fail or something goes wrong, we rarely anticipate exactly how that failure is going to feel.

And it occurred to me, standing there with that box of pasta in my hand, that communication is the key to knowing what to expect.

All of this from my roommate’s grocery habits, I know. It’s a bit of a stretch. But we’ve come too far to go back now, so let’s just wrap it up.

I want to be the kind of person who communicates what to expect whenever possible. I want to be someone who asks, “May I make an observation?” before I do so. I want to be a person who helps others know when to expect foam, so they’re not anxious about the foam when it arrives.

I feel like it’s going to take some work. But I’m going to try.

I’d love to know: when have you been given helpful expectations?