It’s Just Not That Exciting
My wife and I embarked on a journey 3 years ago when we did the Whole 30 program. I lost a bunch of weight that I didn’t even know I had, temporarily reset my taste for sugar and gained a really strange craving for kale salads. I’m not kidding: if I don’t have a kale salad every few days I feel like something’s missing. Anyway... I tried to be mindful during this time and there were a couple of things that I observed:
I did not really have hunger pangs, I had habit pangs. I wanted to have a snack because I was used to having a snack.
There is an absurd amount of sugar in nearly everything. Seriously, reading labels carefully will change your view of food forever.
At some point, I simply got bored with eating. It was just a thing I needed to do.
The last one is curious. I had gotten used to food as entertainment or recreation. Why eat just for nutrition when it can be an extravaganza? Why shouldn’t it be amusing and delightful? Every. Single. Meal.
And, of course, food is delightful. And it is delicious even if it’s not loaded with sugar AND dextrose AND corn syrup. (That’s not a joke: I’ve seen all three on the same label.) But sometimes you just need to have lunch and it doesn’t have to be a big deal. It’s some chicken and vegetables. It’s some fish and vegetables. It’s some vegetables and some other different vegetables. Or some fruit. And it’s healthy and satisfying in every way except that it’s not French fries dipped in BBQ sauce.
There are traditional foods that are only prepared for special occasions: celebrations, holidays, religious observances. The thing is, we’ve gotten used to being able to have anything we want almost any time we want it and subsequently erased nearly every association it may have had with a special occasion. That may not be quite as true these last few months as it used to be, but my last trip to the grocery store suggests that it’s still mostly in effect.
There are people struggling with being bored because they’ve got too much time on their hands (envy...), but I wonder if they’ve gotten bored with their food choices. I wonder what this time would be like if we ate pretty much the same thing each day and got used to not being surprised and delighted the way we’re used to?
Mise en place
It’s French for “putting in place” or “everything in its place”, and the most popular context for the phrase is in the kitchen. It’s a form of preparation that involves getting all your ingredients and tools (and maybe a glass of wine, if it’s been that kind of day) together before you begin setting things on fi... er, cooking.
It takes some of the excitement out of cooking, because there’s a lot less running back and forth to the pantry, looking for spices or realizing that you’re out of clean ramekins. (Ramekin is a weird word, so I had to look it up: we use it to refer to a little circular dish-thingy. The French, from whence the word comes, use ramequin to refer to a small amount of cheese toasted or baked with breadcrumbs, eggs and seasoning in the little dish we call a ramekin. I have yet to discover what the French call the little dish that they bake ramequin in. With nonsense like this, it’s amazing that we can actually translate anything from any language. Seriously...)
Anyway, pros take this pretty seriously because pros don’t mess around. With proper mise en place there’s less of a chance of being unprepared or surprised and things seem to go a lot smoother and faster. Which probably explains why I’ve been so resistant to using it until the last few years. I didn’t grow up in the French culinary tradition. I grew up in a tradition of Minnesotan Norwegian Lutheran casseroles—or “hot dish”—on my mom’s side and German farmers who could weld tractor parts together with swear words on my dad’s side. Stoicism, yes. Elegance and refinement... less so.
My excuse for not gathering together the necessary items beforehand has perennially been that I’m in a hurry, I have to start right now. Never mind that I do NOT write code this way. I don’t even pack for a trip that way. I wouldn’t paint a room that way if I only had an hour. I guess some things do need to be taught in context, or perhaps I’m just a little slow.
I remember watching the Food Network what feels like a loooong time ago. A couple things stand out about those episodes: the chef putting a dish in one of the ovens and then taking the finished dish out of a different oven after the commercial break is one example. “Ah, yes, the magic of television!”, I laughed to myself.
But the other was this: all of the beautiful ingredients magically waiting for the chef in neatly arranged glass bowls and ramekins, waiting for their expert hands to deftly make an omelette or a croque en bouche or a grilled cheese sandwich with pickles. And I sat there, watching, thinking “Well, yeah, it would be nice if someone got all the stuff together for me ahead of time!”
Yeah, dumbass, it would, wouldn’t it?
Efficient Exercises
The deadlift is a powerful activity because nearly every muscle in your body is exercised in order to move the weight off of the floor until you’re standing straight up—especially when the weight gets heavy.
Making soup (most cooking, really) is a powerful activity because all 5 of your senses are exercised: touch as you chop vegetables and stir the pot, taste (obviously), smell (also, duh...), sight (does it look like there are enough carrots? Have they turned that really bright orange yet?) and sound (how hot is the pan?).
Writing is a powerful activity because it exercises your creativity, judgement, style, vocabulary, sense of structure and it encourages clarity.
I think part of what makes these activities interesting is how much of us is engaged in them simultaneously.
If you have to break some eggs…
What’s the difference between an omelette and scrambled eggs? Order. Tidyness. Clear boundaries.
If you try to make an omelette and you screw it up, you can quickly pivot to scrambled eggs: throw in the filling and mash the whole mess around in the pan. Voila! Scrambled eggs. Have you already put the filling on, tried the folding maneuver and it didn’t work? Same thing: apply violence to the omelette and you’ll get scrambled eggs. Nice recovery: treat yourself to a 5th cup of coffee.
Going the other direction is not so easy—impossible, I’d say.
Having a fallback plan that works with an increase in chaos is helpful. If the original plan doesn’t work, there might be something almost as good you can make from the mistake. But it’s important to figure that out ahead of time, because not everything is so easily rescued. (This idea works waaaay better with cooking than with baking, by the way. Baking requires a ridiculous amount of order and structure and should be considered a delicate activity.)
P.S. Some technologies are like this: out of order escalators become stairs (RIP, Mitch Hedberg), dead electric toothbrushes become toothbrushes with giant-assed handles and a broken scissors becomes a matching set of letter openers.
Principles
One of my guilty pleasures is watching the Great British Baking Show. It’s delightful for a lot of reasons (British accents, pastry porn, etc.) but there are some interesting lessons, as well.
The contestants get advance notice of what they’re baking for 2 of the 3 challenges each week, and 1 of the challenges is unknown until the day of. So, for 2 of the challenges they can plan and practice. They can tweak their recipes and prepare special tools—really get things worked out ahead of time.
But something always goes a little wrong: maybe the tent is really warm that day and their stuff melts or won’t cool properly. Maybe they just get distracted and fall behind their schedule. Maybe they forget a step.
This is where it gets interesting. This is where you get to see who really understands the fundamental principles of baking and how well they understand their particular recipe and plan: How do you recover? Can you save the effort you’ve put in or do you have to start over? Do you still have time to start over? Can you ditch part of your plan in order to save the rest of it? Are there any shortcuts or substitutes that won’t ruin it?
And the first, deepest, most important principle of baking (and oh, I don’t know, everything else): don’t panic, see the situation clearly and formulate a new plan with what you’ve got.
Technology vs. Food
Cooking is very much a human endeavor—animals don’t cook their food, even if they do things like bury it or wash it. We benefit enormously from cooking food by needing to spend less time chewing it and by getting more calories and other nutrition from it.
Cooking is inherently about tools and techniques: you can’t really cook without them. Yes, you can bury a sweet potato in some hot coals and let it sit for hours and then dig it out and eat it, but I still think you’re going to want a stick or a rock or something to move the coals with. (Or build the fire, for that matter.) A knife is an indispensable tool for cooking, as well as eating—it just makes every aspect of working with food easier. And applying heat is about the most basic and fundamental cooking technique there is. We build special tools so that we can transform some foods into other foods, like soup or pizza or M&M’s—no other animal does this.
Cooking is technology.
Deglaze
Fancy schmancy. You don’t fool me: there’s a very good—and boring—reason for doing some things.
Sometimes you run across a concept or technique and you think, “Whoa, that sounds complicated—I’ll have to think about that. Maybe read up on it…”
Deglazing a pan when cooking seems like it belongs to that category, but it doesn’t. My take on deglazing a pan is as follows:
Cook some meat in a pan, probably on high or medium high. Let some of it stick. (e.g. sear a steak, stir fry some chicken, etc.)
Grab a liquid—it could literally be almost anything—and pour a little in the pan. It could be vinegar or broth. It could just be water. It could be beer or wine that you would never serve to someone you were on good terms with.
Heat up the undrinkable liquid and scrape up the stuck food. (optional: add some butter, herbs and/or other stuff for additional flavoring)
Pour the scraped-up mixture over the meat you cooked in the pan in step #1.
Congratulations: you made a fancy sauce using food bits that were destined for the garbage and a liquid you wouldn’t drink unless you were dying of thirst—and you did it by getting a head-start on cleaning the pan.
On the Similarities Between Cooking and Writing
It is best to taste and re-season often.
Advance preparation can make the activity more pleasurable.
Recipes are a beginning, but deeper satisfaction can be found within experimentation.
Sipping whiskey (in moderation) or coffee (to excess) whilst engaged can elevate the experience.
There can be happy accidents, as well as the drudgery of throwing away effort and beginning again.
You may not wish to begin very late at night.
Fine, luxurious tools are a pleasure, but not necessary.
If the disorder becomes too great, you may wish to spend a few minutes tidying up.
Bacon.
It can be delightful to engage in it alone, but oftentimes the result is even more enjoyable when shared with friends.