Today's Soup: Thanksgiving Corn Chowder with Bacon

A dairy-free chowder, this soup is rich with veggies and seasonings including potatoes, zucchini, tomatoes, home-roasted red peppers, mild green chiles, fresh cilantro, thyme, cumin, chili powder and paprika. Perhaps surprisingly, it's not spicy at all. Flavorful and truly delish, this recipe is one of our Soup Group specialties.

Sometimes I get nervous about making soup at Soup Group, and will consider ditching. In the land of Soup Group, it's my job to identify each week's soup recipe, convert it - as is usually necessary - to bulk yield, and develop a shopping list based on needed ingredients and our existing inventory. All this takes place before each Wednesday's cooking session. And it means that I am the one to blame if the recipe turns out crap, like if I forget to include or recalculate an ingredient (each of which has happened), or if the cooking instructions are unclear, or if the cupboard doesn't hold the expected ingredients, or if the flavor of the soup doesn't turn out right.

And it's not that the Soup Group ladies are mean or cruel about these failures when they happen (which is infrequent, these days). And it's not that I don't have experience with "pressure" situations - multi-million dollar projects, special events with multiple moving parts, the care and feeding of VIPs. No, it's the shame. I could have done better. I should have done better. It's just literacy and arithmetic, after all. And then I feel stupid for feeling ashamed. It's just a volunteer job, after all.

But anything worth doing is worth doing well.

How much angst and anxiety have been caused by the internalization of that saying, I wonder. Plenty, in my own life. But I think that commitment to excellence (or, to basic competence) also has spurred me on to success in any number of arenas that really matter to me. And that's the trick: exorcising your drive for excellence only in the areas that really matter. This starts with bothering to identify what are the areas in your life that really matter. After that, the task is just to treat those areas as your priority.