A few follow-up thoughts on last week's post on the difference between doing things and talking about doing things.
Cooking gives us a striking illustration of this difference. You can talk about cooking, you can read about it, you can watch shows about it. But it's painfully obvious to everyone that none of these things is cooking. You can't demonstrate you "know" cooking without actually performing the action of cooking.
Better still, in cooking there is a far lower risk of fooling ourselves with a "psychological sense of completion" compared to other domains. And it's interesting to think about why: it boils down to ego injury. If we make a practice of ingredient bragging, or worse, blather in conversation about advanced cooking techniques yet we can't actually cook, it would be a tremendous ego injury if we get found out. It would be transparently pathetic. Therefore, because the risk of embarrassment is too great, our egos don't (and won't) risk pretending to have expertise we don't have.
All of this makes cooking a wonderfully BS-free domain.
In stark contrast, other fields are buried in BS. Have you ever heard an out-of-shape person talking pseudo-knowledgeably about fitness regimens or diets? Another example: in my former professional field of investing, it's hilariously common to hear people blather on about the stock market or the economy with zero knowledge whatsoever behind their talk. (We're clearly in a stock market bubble right now, and I'm deeply concerned about hyperinflation and ultra-high interest rates once the Treasury stops QE.)
Of course the worst of all examples is the domain of politics. We're all experts here. We all feel justified in having strongly held political opinions, even though 99.9% of us have never held any actual political responsibility and half of the electorate doesn't even vote.
Cooking is refreshingly different, and I wonder if one of the reasons I like it so much as a subject (and why I find so many metaphors and so much to talk about in it) is because it's an action-based, non-bullshit domain. If you can cook something you can cook it. You don't talk to demonstrate your competence in cooking, you don't regurgitate factoids and jargon in conversation to demonstrate your competence in cooking, you cook to demonstrate your competence in cooking. There's no way to hide behind "tawk" like there is in all these other domains.
Have you ever heard anyone sling cooking jargon without knowing anything in the same way people constantly sling investing (or economic, or political) jargon without knowing anything? (Yesterday I was chiffonading some local organic collard greens, and I thought, gosh, if I brunoise-diced them instead, they would go great in a sugo that I could simmer in my Chinese ding.)
That is a sentence I'm fairly confident I will never hear spoken. And certainly not by someone who has no idea how to cook.
Sure, okay, there's ingredient bragging and virtue-signaling in cooking. Nothing's ever perfect. And yes, sure, people do watch cooking shows and don't actually cook. But nobody's ego confuses this with actual cooking. You show you can cook by cooking, by preparing food and serving it to friends and family and having them enjoy it. It's refreshing.
READ NEXT: You May Now Ignore All Scientific Studies
***********************
Readers! You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!
And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Flipping An Over Easy Egg
One of the reasons cooking remains endlessly intriguing to me is how it combines so many psychological, mental, and physical skills all into one lifelong discipline.
Even the simplest cooking tasks can be complex, rich experiences. I've written before about how cutting up vegetables and doing recipe pre-prep can be a deeply calming, meditative experience. Particularly when somebody else does it for me.
Most of the cooking tasks we'd think of as relatively easy (like sauteing vegetables, peeling potatoes, washing dishes, frosting a homemade cake and so on) are modest, humble tasks. They don't require skill so much as patience, a commodity increasingly in short supply in the modern era.
Patience. That's the key ingredient that makes it possible for these tasks to calm and relax us.
And finally, there are cooking tasks that, far from being humble, require both practice, skill and a weird overconfidence to do successfully. Think flipping an over easy egg, flipping an omelet or deftly dropping an egg into boiling water to be poached.
I'm not much of an egg poacher or an omelet flipper, those tasks literally intimidate me. I do, however, cook myself two over easy eggs for breakfast nearly every day. With over easy eggs, you have to know at what point a partially fried egg is ready to be flipped. Wait too long and the yolks are overcooked. Do it too soon and the eggs innards run all over the pan. Do it too slow or too fast and the yolk breaks, which ruins everything.
So when that moment comes you cannot be fearful. The egg can feel your fear. Which is why you have to perform these kinds of tasks confidently--or not at all.
Readers, what do you think? In your cooking lives, what kinds of tasks do you consider difficult, even intimidating? And which tasks are calm and relaxing to you? Share your thoughts below!
Read Next: Lessons Learned From a Bathroom Renovation
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Even the simplest cooking tasks can be complex, rich experiences. I've written before about how cutting up vegetables and doing recipe pre-prep can be a deeply calming, meditative experience. Particularly when somebody else does it for me.
Most of the cooking tasks we'd think of as relatively easy (like sauteing vegetables, peeling potatoes, washing dishes, frosting a homemade cake and so on) are modest, humble tasks. They don't require skill so much as patience, a commodity increasingly in short supply in the modern era.
Patience. That's the key ingredient that makes it possible for these tasks to calm and relax us.
And finally, there are cooking tasks that, far from being humble, require both practice, skill and a weird overconfidence to do successfully. Think flipping an over easy egg, flipping an omelet or deftly dropping an egg into boiling water to be poached.
I'm not much of an egg poacher or an omelet flipper, those tasks literally intimidate me. I do, however, cook myself two over easy eggs for breakfast nearly every day. With over easy eggs, you have to know at what point a partially fried egg is ready to be flipped. Wait too long and the yolks are overcooked. Do it too soon and the eggs innards run all over the pan. Do it too slow or too fast and the yolk breaks, which ruins everything.
So when that moment comes you cannot be fearful. The egg can feel your fear. Which is why you have to perform these kinds of tasks confidently--or not at all.
Readers, what do you think? In your cooking lives, what kinds of tasks do you consider difficult, even intimidating? And which tasks are calm and relaxing to you? Share your thoughts below!
Read Next: Lessons Learned From a Bathroom Renovation
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
What Happens Once You've Cooked a Recipe 100 Times?
Readers, do you have any recipes you've cooked so many times that you've lost count?
When you reach this point with a favorite dish, interesting things happen. You barely need to look at the recipe. Preparing it becomes relaxing, even meditative. You don’t think about the process steps and how to do them. Heck, you hardly need to think at all, and the recipe comes out great every time.
Despite all I've written here at Casual Kitchen, you'd think cooking would be meditative and relaxing for me all the time. You'd be wrong. Usually I try to avoid cooking--or even better, shirk it off onto somebody else. But there are several key recipes here, recipes like Chicken Mole, Risotto, Black Beans and Rice, North African Lemon Chicken and Groundnut Stew, that I've made hundreds of times, and I’m so comfortable with these recipes that preparing them becomes as mentally demanding as folding the laundry. Which is my idea of a meditative exercise.
My introduction to this idea was in New Zealand. Our friend Richard, who owns a cafe and catering company in the city of Christchurch, was teaching me how to make a "flat white" (like a cappuccino, only better). Coffee is a refined art in New Zealand and I was struggling to get it just right. The grounds needed to be pressed just enough, the milk needed to be frothed just right, and everything needed to be combined with just the right amount of flair. I screwed up several that went right into the wastebasket. Then, finally, I made one that got a passing grade. Maybe a C-minus.
Richard told me, "after you've properly made 200 of these, I'd let you in front of a customer." I stared at him. As naive as I'm sure this sounds, this was the first time I'd really thought about the concept of making something so many times that it becomes second nature, that you don’t have to think about it, and you can start to add your personality to the process rather than just complete the process.
These are the kinds of things you can do after you've cooked a recipe 20, 50 or even 200 times:
1) You can carry on a conversation while you cook, and pay sincere attention to both tasks.
2) You can scale up the recipe for a large dinner party or a big group with little additional stress.
3) The cooking experience becomes easy, even effortless.
4) You confidently modify the recipe, or add improvisational flourishes as you cook. You know exactly how the recipe works and you know what variables you can and cannot tweak.
5) You make it... and it tastes amazing every time. You may not even know why it tastes amazing, but it just does.
Perhaps this is the home cook's version of the so-called 10,000 Hour Rule. Then again, you certainly don't need 10,000 hours to get good--really, really good--at cooking. Why? Well, just do the math: It only takes fifty hours to make a 30 minute recipe one hundred times (the majority of the recipes here at CK can be made in under 30 minutes for $2 a serving or less). Using the time-saving strategy of heavy rotation--rotating in the easiest, least expensive and most-loved recipes on a twice- or three-times-a-month basis--you could hit the I cooked this 100 times mark with four or five favorite recipes within just a few years.
Which makes cooking healthy food for your family an even easier part of your life than it already is.
Related Posts:
Thoughts On Recipe Development
Making It a Treat
Re-Seasoning: Never Be Bored With Leftovers Again
The Paradox of Cooking Shows
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
When you reach this point with a favorite dish, interesting things happen. You barely need to look at the recipe. Preparing it becomes relaxing, even meditative. You don’t think about the process steps and how to do them. Heck, you hardly need to think at all, and the recipe comes out great every time.
Despite all I've written here at Casual Kitchen, you'd think cooking would be meditative and relaxing for me all the time. You'd be wrong. Usually I try to avoid cooking--or even better, shirk it off onto somebody else. But there are several key recipes here, recipes like Chicken Mole, Risotto, Black Beans and Rice, North African Lemon Chicken and Groundnut Stew, that I've made hundreds of times, and I’m so comfortable with these recipes that preparing them becomes as mentally demanding as folding the laundry. Which is my idea of a meditative exercise.
My introduction to this idea was in New Zealand. Our friend Richard, who owns a cafe and catering company in the city of Christchurch, was teaching me how to make a "flat white" (like a cappuccino, only better). Coffee is a refined art in New Zealand and I was struggling to get it just right. The grounds needed to be pressed just enough, the milk needed to be frothed just right, and everything needed to be combined with just the right amount of flair. I screwed up several that went right into the wastebasket. Then, finally, I made one that got a passing grade. Maybe a C-minus.
Richard told me, "after you've properly made 200 of these, I'd let you in front of a customer." I stared at him. As naive as I'm sure this sounds, this was the first time I'd really thought about the concept of making something so many times that it becomes second nature, that you don’t have to think about it, and you can start to add your personality to the process rather than just complete the process.
These are the kinds of things you can do after you've cooked a recipe 20, 50 or even 200 times:
1) You can carry on a conversation while you cook, and pay sincere attention to both tasks.
2) You can scale up the recipe for a large dinner party or a big group with little additional stress.
3) The cooking experience becomes easy, even effortless.
4) You confidently modify the recipe, or add improvisational flourishes as you cook. You know exactly how the recipe works and you know what variables you can and cannot tweak.
5) You make it... and it tastes amazing every time. You may not even know why it tastes amazing, but it just does.
Perhaps this is the home cook's version of the so-called 10,000 Hour Rule. Then again, you certainly don't need 10,000 hours to get good--really, really good--at cooking. Why? Well, just do the math: It only takes fifty hours to make a 30 minute recipe one hundred times (the majority of the recipes here at CK can be made in under 30 minutes for $2 a serving or less). Using the time-saving strategy of heavy rotation--rotating in the easiest, least expensive and most-loved recipes on a twice- or three-times-a-month basis--you could hit the I cooked this 100 times mark with four or five favorite recipes within just a few years.
Which makes cooking healthy food for your family an even easier part of your life than it already is.
Related Posts:
Thoughts On Recipe Development
Making It a Treat
Re-Seasoning: Never Be Bored With Leftovers Again
The Paradox of Cooking Shows
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
How To Ask All the Wrong Questions
Way, way back in the early days of Casual Kitchen, an acquaintance who wanted to start a blog emailed me with several questions:
What do you do for database backup?
Where do you host your blog?
How do you scale up when your readership grows?
And so on. They were all very interesting, intelligent-sounding questions. And seemingly reasonable questions too, considering that this woman worked in a technical field.
Except that every single one of her questions turned out to be wrong.
Why? Because barely a month or two after she (enthusiastically!) started her blog, she just ...dropped it. She wrote a grand total of four posts.
Four posts. And she hasn’t touched her blog since.
So, all those questions about scaling up, about hosting, about database backup--none of them mattered in the slightest. They were the wrong questions.
You don’t know what you don’t know
Whenever we consider a brand new activity--investing, blogging, cooking, playing tennis, etc.--we always think we know more than we do. It’s when we actually start doing the activity that we come face to face with a real sense of how pathetically little we know.
In fact, our first step towards competence in any new field only comes when we truly wrap our minds around our incompetence. You have to accept and face the disheartening knowledge that you have a long way--a really long way--to go.
In other words, my friend knew so little about blogging that she didn’t even know the right questions to ask. She couldn’t know. Worse, the questions she did ask merely caused her to focus on all the wrong things. Forget worrying about how to back up her blog, she should have been trying to figure out what would make blogging fun enough so she wouldn't quit after four posts.
Wrong about tennis
Another example: Let’s say you decide to take up tennis. You’re in a sports equipment store, nibbling on your fingernail and staring at a wall of tennis racquets. And when the tennis racquet salesperson approaches you, a (seemingly) reasonable question might occur to you: what string tension I should use for my racquet?
Sounds intelligent, right? Except that anyone who's played tennis seriously for any amount of time would laugh uproariously at you for asking it.
Once again: know that your first questions are likely the wrong questions. The only person who will pretend this is the right question is the tennis racquet salesperson, as he attempts to sell you an overpriced $300 racquet.
Worst of all, that $300 racquet raises the stakes. It puts pressure on you to maximize your enjoyment out of tennis, and it may actually increase the chances that you’ll quit the sport in short order.[1]
Better to just go out and spend a summer or two hitting ten thousand balls with an inexpensive, or even a second-hand, racquet. Learn how to keep a ball in play for twenty hits without a miss. Then you'll be competent enough to ask informed questions about proper string tension, what kind of racquet is ideal, what tools you need to add to your game, and so on.
This principle applies to all spots: running, golf, beanbag tossing, even competitive belching. Never buy expensive equipment up front. Wait until you actually know what you need to know.
Wrong about Martha
One last example, from the domain of food: Let’s say you decide to take up cooking, and you’re wondering who to turn to in the food media for help on how and what to cook. You might reasonably look to Martha Stewart and all of her recipe ideas. After all, she’s famous for her cooking, isn’t she? She’s on TV and has her own magazine, right? Wouldn’t it be a great idea to try some of her recipes and techniques?
Nope. Any competent home cook would shake his head at your folly. Why? Because, as any Casual Kitchen reader could tell you, leaping to Martha Stewart-style recipes at the beginning of a home cooking career actually reduces the odds that you’ll continue to cook. You’re more likely to quit in frustration.
The point is this: when you start a new discipline, know that most of your questions, presumptions and ideas about that discipline will be wrong. Wrong in ways you never even imagined. Know this in advance.
Being right
Okay. So what are the right questions then? Here’s what to ask an expert in any field that’s completely new to you:
1) What are the most common mistakes that you typically see beginning [home cooks/ bloggers /tennis players] make?
2) What should I be learning as a new person starting to [cook/blog/play tennis, etc.]?
3) What did you find to be some of the unexpected early challenges of [cooking/blogging, etc.]?
4) What questions haven't I asked you that I should ask?
What’s the takeaway here? Primarily this: the questioner doesn't launch into a line of questions assuming she already knows. None of these are showoff questions that advertise the questioner’s expertise. Instead, each question is asked from a place of humility: this questioner knows she doesn't know.
This is how to take up blogging (or competitive belching) and not quit.
[1] It’s one thing to quit tennis in frustration after dropping $300 on a racquet. But in other domains, the stakes can be far higher. Take for example the domains of investing and personal finance: As many investors learned during the 2000-2002 tech crash and the 2008-2009 banking crisis, not knowing your own level of (in)competence--and not knowing the right questions to ask--can be financially devastating.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
What do you do for database backup?
Where do you host your blog?
How do you scale up when your readership grows?
And so on. They were all very interesting, intelligent-sounding questions. And seemingly reasonable questions too, considering that this woman worked in a technical field.
Except that every single one of her questions turned out to be wrong.
Why? Because barely a month or two after she (enthusiastically!) started her blog, she just ...dropped it. She wrote a grand total of four posts.
Four posts. And she hasn’t touched her blog since.
So, all those questions about scaling up, about hosting, about database backup--none of them mattered in the slightest. They were the wrong questions.
You don’t know what you don’t know
Whenever we consider a brand new activity--investing, blogging, cooking, playing tennis, etc.--we always think we know more than we do. It’s when we actually start doing the activity that we come face to face with a real sense of how pathetically little we know.
In fact, our first step towards competence in any new field only comes when we truly wrap our minds around our incompetence. You have to accept and face the disheartening knowledge that you have a long way--a really long way--to go.
In other words, my friend knew so little about blogging that she didn’t even know the right questions to ask. She couldn’t know. Worse, the questions she did ask merely caused her to focus on all the wrong things. Forget worrying about how to back up her blog, she should have been trying to figure out what would make blogging fun enough so she wouldn't quit after four posts.
Wrong about tennis
Another example: Let’s say you decide to take up tennis. You’re in a sports equipment store, nibbling on your fingernail and staring at a wall of tennis racquets. And when the tennis racquet salesperson approaches you, a (seemingly) reasonable question might occur to you: what string tension I should use for my racquet?
Sounds intelligent, right? Except that anyone who's played tennis seriously for any amount of time would laugh uproariously at you for asking it.
Once again: know that your first questions are likely the wrong questions. The only person who will pretend this is the right question is the tennis racquet salesperson, as he attempts to sell you an overpriced $300 racquet.
Worst of all, that $300 racquet raises the stakes. It puts pressure on you to maximize your enjoyment out of tennis, and it may actually increase the chances that you’ll quit the sport in short order.[1]
Better to just go out and spend a summer or two hitting ten thousand balls with an inexpensive, or even a second-hand, racquet. Learn how to keep a ball in play for twenty hits without a miss. Then you'll be competent enough to ask informed questions about proper string tension, what kind of racquet is ideal, what tools you need to add to your game, and so on.
This principle applies to all spots: running, golf, beanbag tossing, even competitive belching. Never buy expensive equipment up front. Wait until you actually know what you need to know.
Wrong about Martha
One last example, from the domain of food: Let’s say you decide to take up cooking, and you’re wondering who to turn to in the food media for help on how and what to cook. You might reasonably look to Martha Stewart and all of her recipe ideas. After all, she’s famous for her cooking, isn’t she? She’s on TV and has her own magazine, right? Wouldn’t it be a great idea to try some of her recipes and techniques?
Nope. Any competent home cook would shake his head at your folly. Why? Because, as any Casual Kitchen reader could tell you, leaping to Martha Stewart-style recipes at the beginning of a home cooking career actually reduces the odds that you’ll continue to cook. You’re more likely to quit in frustration.
The point is this: when you start a new discipline, know that most of your questions, presumptions and ideas about that discipline will be wrong. Wrong in ways you never even imagined. Know this in advance.
Being right
Okay. So what are the right questions then? Here’s what to ask an expert in any field that’s completely new to you:
1) What are the most common mistakes that you typically see beginning [home cooks/ bloggers /tennis players] make?
2) What should I be learning as a new person starting to [cook/blog/play tennis, etc.]?
3) What did you find to be some of the unexpected early challenges of [cooking/blogging, etc.]?
4) What questions haven't I asked you that I should ask?
What’s the takeaway here? Primarily this: the questioner doesn't launch into a line of questions assuming she already knows. None of these are showoff questions that advertise the questioner’s expertise. Instead, each question is asked from a place of humility: this questioner knows she doesn't know.
This is how to take up blogging (or competitive belching) and not quit.
[1] It’s one thing to quit tennis in frustration after dropping $300 on a racquet. But in other domains, the stakes can be far higher. Take for example the domains of investing and personal finance: As many investors learned during the 2000-2002 tech crash and the 2008-2009 banking crisis, not knowing your own level of (in)competence--and not knowing the right questions to ask--can be financially devastating.
How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com
via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
