Talking you through it
why recipe-less cooking is my jam
I recently joined a brilliant newsletter workshop hosted by Alicia Kennedy, who writes From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy (please read her piece on the Martha Stewart doc, it’s fascinating). We lamented the fact that as food people there is this inherent expectation to provide the recipe when we post anything about a dish we’ve made. A total knee jerk for most people, and it is obviously flattering, but…
It also feels like maybe we are saving buttloads of recipes (myself included) because they look so good, enticing, and delicious. Though we might have plans in the moment to cook them, they sort of just get filed away under D for Donut (insert: Mitch Hedberg joke).
Like squirrels hiding nuts all over the place, only to lose track of nearly half of them. True story! Look it up.
It makes me think harder about people’s general cooking tendencies and their kitchen habits. That this squirrel-like behavior is alluding more to our aspirational cooking selves as opposed to our authentic identity as food slobs. Again, myself included.
We eat sandwiches over the sink like heathens and save videos of highly composed dishes which are really just plates of dopamine, after all.
Saving those recipes in the cloud somewhere helps us feeeeeel like the type of cook we strive to be. Don’t get me wrong, I live for a culinary mood board lifestyle. My catalogue of saved-but-un-tested recipes truly does runeth over, but I see those as inspiration more than anything.
What is hysterical about all of this, and maybe you can relate here, is that a written recipe is not a reflection of how I cook!
Though, as chef and a person who loves to share and teach - I am still torn. It does feel like my responsibility to offer recipes because it’s what I do. But then I have to consider that an actual recipe, one with measurements and well thought out instructions, that has been tested, and can assure you a good outcome, is really a whole different bag of tricks.
Recipe development is labor. There is money spent on ingredients, multiple attempts and efforts made, time dedicated, and intellectual property shared.
The whole idea behind some of my recent past projects, things like, “What’s in Yer Fridge”, (where I surprised my friends at their homes and cooked them a meal from whatever they had on hand), and The MouthBrain Sessions, where I’m currently hosting dinner parties with no planned menu, are in fact antithetical to the recipe approach to cooking.
Instead, I’m choosing to host events the way I like to to teach. Shoulder to shoulder over a cutting board is where I can best impart everything you need to know. There is an exchange of ideas and questions, and a conversation around cooking. It’s the best way to understand doneness, texture, viscosity, and flavor so that the dish itself is more ingrained in you. I like to spell out all of the options for ingredient substitutions, ratios, cooking times, things to look for, so you can make it again and again with different combinations and feel confident doing so.
I know… I’m digging deep on all of this lately, so bear with me.
But I have to tell you my dear Substack family, that putting my food philosophy into writing is helping me find my way again. One newsletter at a time 🫶🏻
MouthBrain will be taking a break over the holiday season while we do some private events (we also have Loosha’s 4th bday in the mix there).
I will be sharing an early ticket drop for the 2025 season here to paid subscribers and those on my waitlist. To join the waitlist, comment here, email me, do something! zoefoodparty@gmail.com
❤️❤️❤️❤️