Levantine Claypot Chicken

This stew is one of those dishes where I get inspired by a technique and tweak the flavors and ingredients to push the meal into a different cuisine or profile. In this case, I am utilizing a Sri Lankan style of cooking chicken curry in a clay pot and changing the flavors to be subtly Levantine. However, clay pot cooking and slow braising are ancient techniques and it is likely a dish similar to this already exists! This is why learning foundational techniques from around the world can help you invent an incredible dish and give you more flexibility to cook with the ingredients you have on hand.

I am using an unglazed clay pot that I absolutely love. They take a while to “season” and can smell slightly cheesy before you first cook in them, but the process is well worth it. Because the clay traps moisture, you end up needing less liquid in the recipe. Another reason why clay is a popular cooking material in arid climates! If you are interested in getting a clay pot, I recommend Ancient Cookware (they test their clay for lead, which is very important). For a great guide on seasoning an unglazed clay pot, this video by Asai Rasai is easy to follow and informative.

For the toasted spices:

• Two cardamom pods

• 4 allspice berries

• 1 teaspoon black pepper corns

• ½ teaspoon each of: fenugreek, nigella, fennel, ajiwain,

Heat your clay pot and add in the whole spices. Toast, stirring regularly, until the spices are fragrant and warming in color, about 1-3 minutes. Transfer the whole spices to a stone mortar and pestle. Grid the spices until they are a rough powder. Add in one black lime and pound until smooth.

Add the ground spices to the clay pot:

•  Two teaspoons each of: cumin, coriander, Aleppo pepper

• One teaspoon each of: cinnamon, sumac, espelette (or cayenne)

Toast the ground spices in the clay pot, stirring frequently. The pot is hotter now and they spices are finer so they will toast quickly. When they are fragrant and the chili burns your nose, put into a bowl with the freshly ground whole spices.

For the Spiced Chicken:

• 6 bone in chicken thighs with the skin, washed and patted dry

• Olive oil

• 1 serrano chili, halved (for a milder version use one dried Kashmiri chili)

• 1 red onion or 3 shallots, sliced

• 1 “thumb” of ginger, about an inch in diameter, sliced in matchsticks

• 6 cloves of garlic, chopped

• 3 fresh bay leaves

• 5 small plum tomatoes, quartered

• ¼ cup of pitted kalamata olives with their brine

• ½ cup of red wine

• Salt to taste

In a large bowl, toss the clean and dry chicken thighs with the toasted spices and a few pinches of salt until thoroughly coated and set aside.

Heat over high heat a generous glug of olive oil in the clay pot. Add in the ginger, chili and bay leaves and fry until the ginger is golden on the edges. Add in the sliced onion and garlic and briskly sauté until the onion becoming translucent. Sprinkle over one pinch of salt and stir to release more juices. Add in the tomatoes and the olives with their brine (should be only a tablespoon or so). Continue to sauté until the tomatoes begin to wilt.

Nestle in the pieces of chicken in a single layer, covering with the onion mixture. Make sure to pour over any extra spices that didn’t stick to the chicken. Cover with the wine and the lid. Allow the chicken to begin to bubble rapidly before you lower the heat to medium or medium low. After about 30 minutes, flip over the chicken and spoon more of the onion mixture on top. Taste the sauce at this point to see if you want to add more salt. After 30 more minutes, check the chicken. You should be able to pull off a piece and taste it. It should melt in your mouth, but not disintegrate. If it feels dry, let it cook for 15 more minutes before you check again. If it moist and tender, turn off the heat and let the chicken cool its juices for 30 minutes before you serve.

This chicken goes best with Saffron Rice and a light red wine. Bon Appetit!

Spaghetti Provençal

This is a pasta that I absolutely love to make in the late summer when all of the ingredients are at their peak. It’s a bit of a riff on a Sicilian dish called Pasta alla Norma and French Ratatouille. It’s one of those rare dishes that is both hearty and light, and really makes for a mouthwatering meal. One of the most important steps in this dish is salting and draining the eggplant and zucchini to remove the bitter liquid and improve texture in the finished dish. 

Ingredients

1 large zucchini

1 small eggplant

8 roma or early girl tomatoes

5 sprigs fresh basil

1 package good spaghetti (I prefer the thicker spaghetti alla chitarra for this)

2 anchovies

6 cloves garlic

1 small onion

½ cup of wine

Grated Ricotta Salata

Capers

Kalamata or Salt Cured Greek Olives

Aleppo pepper or calabrian chili

Sicilian Oregano

Salt

Good olive oil

Begin by cutting the zucchini and eggplant into 1 inch cubes. Lay them on a cutting board or shallow pan and generously coat in salt. Leave for 1-3 hours in a sunny place until most of their liquid has leached out. 

Wrapping a little at a time of the zucchini and eggplant in a cloth, squeeze out the excess liquid over the sink. Place the squeezed eggplant and zucchini in a large bowl and set aside.

Finely slice the garlic cloves. Pour a generous amount of olive oil in a dutch oven and add in the sliced garlic cloves, a pinch of chili pepper, two sprigs of basil and the anchovies to the cold oil. Turn the heat on to high and begin to sauté once the garlic bubbles.

Finely chop the onion and add it to the dutch oven, adding a pinch of salt and stirring frequently until the onion is translucent. Add in about a tablespoon of capers and 10 olives sliced in half. 

Now add in the zucchini and eggplant and sauté briskly. More liquid will leach out but the pieces of vegetables should remain firm. Once the liquid has cooked off add in a half cup of wine (red or white) to deglaze. 

While this is simmering, chop the tomatoes and add them back to the pan, keeping the flame high and stirring as the sauce begins to bubble. Add in another sprig of basil and stir frequently from the bottom of the pot to ensure everything is cooking evenly. At the ten minute mark the vegetables should be softening and the tomatoes “melting”. 

This is now the perfect moment to start your pasta. Bring a large pot of salted water to a bowl. The water should be as salty as the ocean so taste it to make sure. Once the water is boiling add in the spaghetti. You’ll have to keep tasting it to tell when it is done. A good way to know is if you bite the spaghetti and look in the center, there should be a very thin center that looks hard, while the rest is soft - that is al dente. Using tongs add in the spaghetti directly to your sauce along with a ladle or two of pasta water. Stirring vigorously to coat the pasta, keep adding more pasta water if it looks too dry. Take it off the head and taste to see if you need any more salt. Add in the sicilian oregano, the rest of the basil leaves torn up and the grated ricotta salata. Serve immediately in heaping piles on plates and enjoy!

Braising

My friend texted me the other day asking for help making braised chicken thighs to go with Alice Water’s phenomenal Leeks in Cream recipe. She wasn’t sure what flavor profile to use and had never braised anything before and I was more than happy to share some wisdom regarding this often over complicated, but at it's heart simple, technique. Braising is essentially cooking an ingredient in enough liquid to keep it moist (usually a couple inches) long enough for the compounds, connective tissue (in the case of meat) and flavor compounds to break down and conform. A great example of how this works is when we cook octopus. Like steak, if you cook the octopus quickly and assertively it is mouthwateringly tender. Cook it for a second too long and it becomes tough and rubbery. That is unless you continue cooking it in some liquid for several hours - that’s when something magical occurs and the octopus becomes tender once again, even more so this time, and more imbued with flavor than ever before. Of course, my friend wasn’t trying to braise octopus, rather she was trying to make a simple and easy dish that she could throw together. That’s the beauty of braising - even though it takes a long time, its requires little intervention and is almost impossible to mess up if you have time to spare for the alchemical mystery to take place. This is what I told her for braising a chicken to and it applies to most types of meat (and octopus) with the appropriate time adjustments:

Coat a Dutch oven generously with oil. You want to easily brown your chicken to a crisp golden, but you don’t want the total braise to be oily. Toss in some cured fatty pork (bacon, lardons, pancetta, guanciale, pork belly) and keep the pan hot enough to crisp the bacon, but not to burn it. Dredge your chicken thighs in flour seasoned generously with salt (it should taste salty if you dab some on your tongue), pepper and fennel (you could add in chili flake, paprika, cumin, coriander) and brown your chicken well on both sides. Remove from the pan and add in a chopped onion and a couple cloves of chopped garlic (you could use shallot, leeks, fennel as well) and sauté until the onion becomes translucent and starts to brown. Then deglaze with about a cup of white wine and return the chicken to the pan along with some fresh hard herbs (I love fresh bay leaves, thyme, sage or rosemary), peeled carrots and celery stalks cut in three inch pieces. Cover the whole pot with stock until only the very top of the chicken rests above the liquid like succulent islands, and set over a low flame. It should be hot enough that two or so bubbles rise to the surface regularly, and you may have to bring it up to a near boil first for this to happen. Leave the lid on cracked or make a cartouche, which is my favorite was to keep a braise moist and the sauce thick. To do this, take a piece of parchment paper (not wax, the wax will melt into your food) and fold it like you are making a paper snowflake, measure the radius of your pan and cut the end of your paper in a curve that length. Then, snip off the tip of your little pie wedge so that when you unfold it there is a hole in the middle. Place this paper round on the surface of the braise, it should fit perfectly inside the pot. Continue to cook the chicken for around 2-3 hours, checking periodically. You can add in some potatoes about an hour through to cook if you’d like a sturdier braise. The chicken is done as soon as it becomes tender – this happens when you take a fork and press it into the chicken, it should look like it’s about to shred and you should pierce it very easily.

 The sky is the limit with a braise like this – you could deglaze with red wine, brandy, sherry, bourbon, beer – even vodka. You could use pork, beef, rabbit, lamb, venison, wild boar, octopus, squid, etc. and you only need to adjust the cook time as the redder the meat the longer it takes (octopus takes even longer). You can use any vegetables you want, you can add broth, tomatoes, water or more wine for liquid. You can even add yogurt or buttermilk! Spices are also limitless and almost all cuisines around the world have a braised meat dish following roughly this method - from boeuf bourguignon to ropa vieja to doro wat to rogan josh. The only thing I suggest is to use your senses! Which flavor profiles go together? If I want to mix two components that are at odds how to I balance them? For example, classic coq au vin is like the chicken braise I shared, but with red wine. To balance this the recipe uses mushrooms that add earthiness and the red wine is traditionally a lighter variety. If you want to braise beef in yogurt, cumin and coriander and cinnamon are your friends, they’ll add depth and sweetness that meets everything in the middle.

Happy Braising! 

Puntarelle

If I had to pick a favorite time of year to cook, it must be the fall. I love it when the weather gets cooler and wetter and there’s almost no better view to me than mist wreathing mountains. I love it when the markets start getting in the orange and green squashes, bitter greens, fennel, persimmons, pomegranates, cabbages and leeks. It makes be positively anxious to cook something warm and satisfying with all the new produce. When building a meal for colder days, I love including lots of vegetables so that the meal retains its freshness. One of the easiest ways to do this is to make a fresh salad of bitter chicories dressed in a light and flavorful dressing of anchovies, an acid, perhaps some capers or olives, salt and olive oil. My very favorite version of this is the incomparable Puntarelle alla Romana. It is a classic roman recipe made with a very distinctive variety of chicory called puntarelle. A head of puntarelle resembles very spiky dandelion greens spouting from a connected sphere of white fleshy fingers. It is these fingers that are prized and to make the dish properly, you must separate them all from one another and carefully julienne them. There is a special tool they use in Rome that resembles a small wooden box, open on each end, with a lattice of wires strung across the top. The puntarelle “fingers”, which are hollow on the inside, are pushed into the box and conveniently sliced, saving a lot of time for the cooks who make hundreds a day. For us, the knife will suffice and as the season is short, allow yourself this small bit of hard work for a delicious reward.

One head of puntarelle

two anchovies

one clove of garlic

sherry vinegar

olive oil

salt

lemon

Separate the puntarelle, discarding the leaves. Julienne each ‘finger’ by thinly slicing lengthwise. Place the julienned puntarelle in a bowl of ice water with the juice of one lemon. In a mortar and pestle, pound the garlic, anchovy and a pinch of salt until a paste is formed. Add in about a tablespoon of red wine vinegar and pound to combine. Using the pestle to stir vigorously, add in a thin stream of olive oil until the dressing is emulsified. Drain the puntarelle, discarding the liquid. In a large bowl combine the puntarelle and dressing, tossing to thoroughly combine. Serve cold, piled on to plates.

A Pot of Beans

There is nothing more comforting and nourishing than a pot of beans. It’s one of the most economic dishes as a little does go a long way and nothing much is needed besides a few flavorings. Through the late summer we have a wide variety of fresh beans in their pods available at the farmer’s market. There are heirloom varieties like tiger’s eye and tongue of fire, but there are the more familiar cannellini, butterbean and kidneys. I have a soft spot for fresh beans. I love shucking them out of their shell and I love that I can cook them immediately because forethought often doesn’t pan out and usually when I want to eat something, I want to make it right then and there. Fresh beans are perfect for this and I treasure their short season by making many iterations. My go to is usually a Mexican recipe of pinto beans called “Frijoles de la Olla” or Pot Beans, but today I’ve decided to travel across the Atlantic and use a similar technique for cannellini beans. What’s wonderful about bean recipes is how versatile they are and how easily adaptable to various flavorings. When I make Frijoles de la Olla, I usually cook the beans in a homemade broth of water, a halved onion, a halved head of garlic and some dried chiles – usually chipotle, guajillo and ancho. Sometimes I add in epazote, Sicilian oregano or some fennel seeds, but the beans are just as good without them. When I simmer beans like this I usually don’t add salt until the very end, but to be quite honest, I’m not sure salting at the end is necessary because I like to salt the sautéed vegetables that are mixed in and no matter what these beans are always tender and flavorful. I’m somewhat superstitious though, so if you have a family rule, it’s best to stick to the guidance of whichever aunt or grandparent is certain.  For fresh beans, I love sautéing the vegetables in the fat from a flavorful piece of meat that has been browned and set aside – in this case lamb sausage. Then the beans get tossed in, coated with extra flavor and covered in stock. If the beans are fresh they’ll simmer 45 minutes to an hour until tender, if they are dried it will take longer and I often add in the vegetables at the end so they retain more flavor. You decide which, just don’t forget to share a warm bowl with someone you love.

Equipment:

A large dutch oven

a slotted spoon

a wooden spatula

Ingredients:

Olive oil

3 fresh lamb sausages, cut into 1 inch rounds

one large onion or two small, chopped

one carrot, chopped

4 large garlic cloves, chopped

1-3 serranos, whole

one bulb of fennel, chopped

3 fresh bay leaves

5 sage leaves, chopped

fennel seeds, whole

cumin seeds, whole

2 cups cannellini beans, fresh, shucked

2 cups stock (chicken, beef, lamb, vegetable)

2 cups water

salt

black pepper

Heat enough olive oil in your dutch oven to lightly cover the bottom. Once the oil is hot, add in your sausages and cook them until browned on both “meat” sides of the pieces. Remove the sausage with a slotted spoon and place them on a plate. Reserve. Put the onion, carrot, fennel, garlic, bay leaves, sage leaves, serranos (adding to your heat preference) into the dutch oven and saute briskly. The juices from the oven ought to nicely deglaze the browned bits from the sausage. Add in a couple pinches of salt, fresh cracked black pepper and several pinches of fennel and cumin seeds. Once the vegetables begin to soften, add in the fresh beans and stir everything to thoroughly coat. After a few minutes of sauteeing, add in the broth and water. When the beans reach a boil, turn them down to a simmer and cover with the lid cracked. Once they are tender, about 45 minutes, taste the beans and add in some more salt until they are rich and delicious. Then, add in the sausage and cook about 10 minutes longer to allow the sausage to fully cook. Remove from the heat and serve with crusty bread and salsa verde.

A note:

If you are making this recipe with dried beans soak one cup of beans in 4 cups of water over night. Drain them and add them to a pot with the broth, water, bay leaves and serranos. Bring to a boil and simmer for an hour. Meanwhile, cook the sausage and vegetables the same as the recipe above (omitting the bay leaves and serranos, of course), turning the heat off the vegetables after 5 minutes of sauteeing. When the beans are ready, pour them into the dutch oven with the sautéed vegetables and cook for another hour. You may need to add more water – if so try to do so sparingly, just ½ cup at a time. Proceed with the rest of the recipe as usual.

For creamier beans:

Once the beans are tender, blend a quarter of the mixture and return to the pot.

Chicken Soup

It wasn’t until I started making this chicken soup that I realized that not only do I like soup, I love it. For a long time, I just thought that soups always seemed vaguely mushy and under seasoned – watery at best, overcooked grey vegetable puree at worst. But this year in my hometown on the coast it got wet and cold (something I happen to love because the ocean makes everything misty and a touch more magical) and I started craving it. It helped that I learned how to make a Chinese style chicken stock when I was in New York that I could repurpose as a fully functional, hassle free way of making soup. One of the hardest parts of homemade soup is the stock – it takes so long to make it that we often use a lot less of it than we should and miss out on a lot of flavor as a result. The method we use here is to simmer a whole chicken with aromatics for about an hour and a half, until the chicken meat is tender, removing the chicken and shredding the meat and adding it back into the pot with vegetables and starches of our choice. What is so great about this recipe – as with other good recipes – is that it is so versatile! Any variety of aromatics can be used to flavor the broth and invite different variations or additions. We’ll start with a basic chicken vegetable soup here, but feel free to experiment on your own once you’ve mastered the technique!

Chicken Soup

Equipment

Large Pot or Dutch Oven

Tongs

Large Bowl

For the Broth

1 whole chicken

1 onion, halved

1 head of garlic, halved,

1 celery stalk, cut in two pieces

1 carrot, cut in two pieces

About 1 teaspoon black peppercorns

For the soup

1 onion, medium dice

3 carrots, peeled and cut into 2 inch pieces

3 stalks of celery, medium dice

4 medium potatoes (I love red skinned for this soup), cut into 2 inch pieces

thyme, savory or dried rosemary

pinch each of ground coriander, cumin and paprika

salt

fish sauce and/or white soy

clove of garlic

To make the broth place the whole chicken, halved onion and garlic head, celery, carrot and black peppercorn in a large pot or dutch oven and cover with cool water, leaving an inch of space between the surface of the water and the rim of the pot. Bring to a boil and immediately reduce to a low simmer (2-3 continuous bubbles while) and cover, checking periodically to skim the scum from the surface. After about 90 minutes, peel off part of the chicken’s skin to check the meat. It should be very soft and easily shred. If you taste it, it should melt in your mouth. Once the meat is tender, use your tongs to remove the chicken and aromatics from the pot, placing them in a large bowl. Increase the heat so that the pot is vigorously simmering and add in your vegetables with a generous pinch of salt. Using your tongs and a fork if necessary, remove all the meat from the chicken, tearing any large pieces like the breast into smaller chunks. Put the chicken meat back into the soup. At this point, taste the broth and see how much more salt you want to add. Add in the spices and herbs and a dash of white soy and/or fish sauce for a nice depth of flavor. Right before you turn of the heat, grate in half a clove of garlic with a microplane and stir to combine. Remove from heat and serve in bowls garnished with chopped parsley and a side of crusty bread.

A Note on Spices

A Note on Spices:

Most recipes don’t accurately add in the right amounts of spices for fear that their readers might “over spice” their food and end up with something that tastes much more like oregano than tomato sauce. Personally, I think it’s better to be accurate and to encourage a cook to use their own judgement and preferences. Do you hate oregano? Don’t add it then. In fact, I wouldn’t even keep in in your pantry. But, if your oregano is a little older maybe add a bit more. If you add slowly and taste after each addition, it will be surprising indeed if you over spice. That said, fresh herbs and spices are much better. One herb that is a personal favorite and just so happens to be much better fresh is bay leaf. If you don’t have access to it but you have space, try growing a small tree in your yard or in a large pot if you live in a cold climate. They do, in fact, taste like something and that something is camphoric and slightly sweet and hints of the forest. They are good in just about anything. If you only have access to them occasionally, make bay salt and use it where ever bay leaves and salt are required.

Bay Salt

6 fresh bay leaves, tough stem removed

1 cup of good salt

using and electric spice grinder or clean coffee grinder pulse the bay leaves and tablespoon of the salt until the bay leaves are fully broken up into small pieces in the salt. It should be light green, with pale flecks. Mix this salt into what you have reserved. Store in an airtight container, in a cool, dry place that is away from the light. It will last you up to a year.

How to Cook

What is different about knowing what to cook and knowing how to cook? In today’s world, we are inundated with recipes telling us what to cook (for dinner, as meal prep, as a quick lunch), as if the biggest roadblock to consistently cooking for yourself is deciding what to make, instead of knowing how to cook and enjoying it.

Instead, these options often create a glut of information that is paralyzing. We must make something fast and easy, but delicious and satiating, but also exotic and novel, but also comforting and familiar. It’s exhausting. The pressure to make something good comes with all that the idea of goodness entails - the moralizing and people pleasing, the subjectivity and its need for objective value. Usually we end up forgetting what foods we like in the first place and rarely do we enjoy cooking.

Feeding ourselves is perhaps the oldest form of self-care that there is. It’s incredibly important not only for us, but for our loved ones and those who rely on us, that we can make a satisfying meal. And yet fewer and fewer people have the ability. If we think about someone who is a good cook, it often seems as if that person has more of a magical ability than a learnable skill. We can’t understand how they make something delicious seem all too easy. They never even use a recipe, yet it always turns out! How do they do it? Were they taught as children? Well, usually, but not always. Learning how to cook isn’t difficult, most people just don’t have anyone to teach them how.

When I read recipes I’m usually only skimming through the ingredients to get rough amounts and I very rarely look at the steps. Why? Because I know how to cook. I’m familiar enough with the order of operations, so to speak, to confidently cook most things. There are of course exceptions for extra complicated, technical recipes, but even with baking, I know pretty much what I am doing. Some of this I picked up cooking when I was younger with other women who were accomplished home cooks and some I’ve picked up working in restaurants and developing retail food products. What has consistently surprised me is how little information there is out there about the order of operations and the technique of cooking. In other words, how little information we get on how to cook.

The lack of information on technique is often attributed to two things – 1.) the content of numerous recipes based on trends is much greater that the content of how to cook things well. Which means that you get more material and advertising potential if you create a need for recipes. And 2.) recipes and most food blogs advertise themselves by touting that they are “fast and easy”. Now what does “fast and easy” mean? Usually that the recipe isn’t accurate. A well-known example of this is the misrepresentation in recipes of how long things take. If you make one of these recipes the result is often little like it was advertised and you’re left thinking that you must have done something wrong but you don’t know what it was. Caramelizing onions is a great example of this. To caramelize onions, you have cook them for a minimum of 40 minutes, period. Can you imagine if a recipe said this instead of “sauté onions until caramelized, 5 minutes”? The recipe would not be quick and easy and probably wouldn’t get clicked. Another example is how hot you need to get your pan and how hot most “quick” food is cooked. An old saying I like that isn’t used as much anymore is “cook over a brisk flame”, which in recipes is invariably stated as medium. Realistically, many things get cooked on very high heat with an attentive pair of eyes watching. And attentiveness isn’t exactly “easy” either, is it?

Despite how many recipes that tout this “quick and easy” mentality, there are many home cooks I know that don’t want a 20-minute meal, they want to know how to cook. They want to feel comfortable and confident in a kitchen. They want to know how to make any given braised meat dish rather than knowing how to make the best coq au vin or tagine. But there isn’t a way for them to learn how to cook anymore. Cook books used to be better resources for this, but often the older books are strictly French, focusing on what is called French technique, (useful but not the end all be all of cooking techniques) and are now needlessly expensive. Modern day cookbooks focus on one type of cuisine (i.e. North Indian) or one type of food (i.e. soups). Even online websites will have seemingly a whole article before the recipe telling you how to make it, but it feels specific to that recipe and is usually just too confusing if you don’t know what you are doing.

Another huge roadblock to confidently cooking is something I call “cooking with your eyes closed”. In other words, cooking without tasting. Usually this is because a lack of confidence – if you taste a dish midway through and it isn’t good, what do you do? Isn’t it just better to finish it and grit your teeth as you eat it, chocking it up to a bad day? Honestly half of cooking is “fixing” – dishes don’t taste amazing immediately. That is, knowing what something needs by using all your senses while you cook. What does it look like? What’s the texture? Smell? Taste? How can you be more fully present with your food as you cook it?

Ok, being present is all well and good, but it’s even more important to know how to respond to your senses. Which brings me to troubleshooting, i.e. how do we adjust for imbalance. If something is too dry, too salty, too acidic, or too sweet what do we do? These are skills that we don’t teach our home cooks and that we don’t learn. Depending on the type of food we grew up eating we might have a trick or two up our sleeve, but we don’t have an exhaustive list of what to do for every little thing that might go wrong, and even if we do its usually only for that “golden recipe”.

Now, even if you have a fool proof recipe if you have made it multiple times, you are probably used to some variation in flavor and I’m betting you think it is your fault, so to speak. But that probably isn’t the case. In a good restaurant, cooks are used to receiving product that has some variation in size color and taste. This could be because of seasonality, purveyor or even the variety we are using (did you know strawberries have very short season – so to accommodate high demand strawberry farmers grow different varieties throughout the year to have them continually available?). Even pantry staples have variation. What does an experienced cook do to keep dishes consistent? Well she’s going to be constantly tasting and adjusting not just her dish, but the ingredients she’s using. Even bakers and patissiers adjust their recipes with changes in humidity. These tweaks might be overkill for a home cook, but it pays to understand how much everything varies so that if something isn’t tasting right, say your carrots soup is more acidic than usual, you’ll know that your carrots are less sweet, maybe the variety you got is more fibrous and you can add some extra caramelized onion or sweet potato.

It’s this engagement that is the most important part of cooking. And how do you become engaged in the process? By enjoying it. To do this it’s important to divorce yourself from the exact science mentality and succumb to the unexplainable alchemy of cooking. You could control all variables and still come up with variation in flavor so why kill yourself with anxious measuring when you could just taste your dish. Ask yourself what is delicious? What do you love? What were the flavors that first spoke to you? Which ingredients excite you the most or feel the most exotic? If you pictured a Greek goddess holding out a plate of food to you, what is she offering?