Cooking must be this one thing I have been doing for years where I saw no notable improvement in my results. I dig cooking, I dig the creativity involved and the ability to taste the result immediately, laying open where the taste spectrum could be enhanced or changed on the next attempt.
But while I love to cook I find that my dishes rarely taste awesome. They're always decent to alright but then I eat at a friend's house who doesn't see himself as an awesome cook and it just tastes marvellous.
I tried it all: More spices, more frequent pretasting, high quality ingredients, cooking with recipes. Yet I still find the mojo is often missing from what I turn out.
Then a few days ago I was cooking with a friend and we are basically tackling that same challenge - trying to get better in the kitchen because we dig cooking so much.
And it seems we finally stumbled upon the missing ingredient for the process - a hefty dose of chaos.
You see, I could make out certain characteristics of my cooking that differed from the people whose meals tasted great. For one my kitchen is always really clean compared to my friends when they cook. I tend to wash up or put stuff away while the food is cooking while my friends often just focus on the creation part, leaving the kitchen to be an utter chaos zone without mercy. Downright reckless I would call it.
And then it really hit me. Maybe I am simply going about it way too slowly. I always felt like I was in the kitchen longer than needed and that this was a major difference to the people who could cook - they would literally throw their ingredients into the pot and pan, would swing the wooden spoon and shake the pasta wildly in the strainer with... gusto. Like an insane artist throwing paint on the canvas ;)
And so, when my poor-cook friend and me cooked the other day we purposefully decided to cook with more chaos involved; more impulsiveness and less of a rational approach to it. We'd smell spices to throw in but wouldn't start thinking what spices were missing still. We'd go with intuition, trying out ingredients with the overall mix and instantly tasted whether it worked and whether the dish needed more of that.
Granted, we went a little easy to not overdo it quickly, so we opted for pretasting a lot. But whenever we found we waited too long, tried to think of what was missing for too long or weighted the options of what veggies to throw in next we'd catch ourselves and found back to the impulsive and quick chaos-mojo cooking - a thoroughly enjoyable experience to say the least. Freeing!
And you know what? We were both amazed to taste what we created. We dug it, we really liked the taste. Granted there was so much to improve upon but for the first time in forever we both felt we may have discovered the missing component in tasty cooking. Or at least one of them. An attitude, if you will.
So if you are like me and find yourself stuck with dull meals that you can't seem to figure out how to improve upon - allow yourself some more chaos and ... dare I say time pressure, making sure not to get stuck for too long. I found that the overthinking and overly careful nature of a neophite cook is exactly what makes the food end up tasting dull and shy...
Any of you pro-cooks out there, do you find this to be the case as well? Am I barking up the right tree here?
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