Dear Tamar,
Since reading An Everlasting Meal, I’ve been obsessed with "catching my tail"—figuring out what to do with odds and ends after I've cooked. But a challenge still looms: How to decide what to buy and cook in the first place, when cupboards and fridge are bare, or when you're not feeling inspired? What do you do when you're at the market or in the kitchen without a plan?
-Hungry and Indecisive
Dear Hungry and Indecisive,
I always did better in art class than on my own with a sketchbook. In classes, which I took in high school and college, I would sink into drawing. Time would contract. I would start. I would draw. Eventually someone would tug at my arm because a bell had rung. When I brought my sketchbook out into the world, though, time slackened. Instead of sinking in, I would hear a couple debating on a neighboring bench. I would sense mosquitos begining to circle. I would feel the first growls of hunger. It was so unproductive that I gave it up entirely.
Until a few weeks ago. I came across the chalk drawings of David Zinn. He’s an artist in Ann Arbor who relies, for his street art, on pareidolia. I like the Wikipedia definition of pareidolia: the tendency to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual. Pareidolia is seeing a man in the moon, a dragon in the clouds, a face in the knot on a plank of pine. Any doodling I’ve done since giving up drawing has been born in pareidolia. I see a nose and understand where to draw a chin, a brow, a hand, a flower. Absent the nebulous spot that looked to me like a nose, though: crickets. (Very loud crickets. Distracting ones.)
Why can I draw when my mind hiccups and sees something that isn’t there? I think it’s the limitation—the organizing principle of a constraint. Though I’m not great at practicing it, I’ve come to believe constraints the key to making anything at all. Halfway through writing my first book, I was offered a week at a writer friend’s family house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I set up a little office at the dining room table and quickly realized I would need something to hem me in, or I’d spend the precious week spinning out, into the mountains, the pelican-dotted beach, the bobcat I’d heard stalked the hills. I tore a piece of graph paper from a notebook and wrote a heading: Useful constraints. I then drew a
next to which I wrote: Contractions. Below it I drew a
with the label: Conjunctions. I taped it to the table. I wrote several chapters in that house, thanks to the rules laid out on my scrap of paper.
Drawing. Writing. Cooking. Doing any relies on boundaries, limitations, constraints. As long as they’re not actively infelicitous, most any are good. At Farm 255 in Georgia, I made a dish called The Farmer. Its constraints: it had to be a vegetarian, starch-protein-green combination with a food cost of something like 20%, for $9. There were variations. It might be rice, chili, herbs. Or, the one I remember most clearly: cornbread, coconut-milk braised black-eyed peas, and garlicky sautéed greens.
The constraints of The Farmer still scaffold my weekday cooking—though now it’s starch, main, vegetable. It may be cornbread, beans, and cooked greens; or boiled potatoes, boiled eggs, green beans; or tortillas, beans, cheese, pico de gallo, radishes; or polenta, fried leftover salami or sausage, and roasted mushrooms. Sometimes, a category drops out. In general: thumbs up for a starch, a main, a vegetable. Thumbs down for anything more elaborate.
At the grocery store or farmer’s market, I’m guided by the same principles. Keeping in mind constellations of starch, main, vegetable reminds me to find bread or cornmeal or rice or potatoes or beans, and meat or eggs or tofu or fish (including in jars) and salad greens, kale, cabbage, squash, cauliflower, herbs etc.
One of the best things about scaffolding is the way it obviates itself. Thinking back on recent meals, I see how far the original structure recedes. Last night I fried old tortillas into chips and made a family-sized tray of nachos. The night before, there was spaghetti with carrot-top pesto and salad. At some earlier point, rice, boiled eggs, and cabbage. Tonight it will be campanelle with meatballs and lettuce salad. Underneath them all, I can just half-see the smudges of my blueprint.
Dear cook, it doesn’t matter which constraints you choose. All that matters is that you have something hemming you in—keeping you from spinning off into the mountains and their bobcats. I’m drawing again—only in chalk, and only when a bit of cement offers meaning out of nebulousness. (The below is half my own pareidolia, half a copy of something of David Zinn’s.) Having limitations is key—the fewer decisions you have to make when hungry, the better.
TONIGHT! April 11, I’ll be interviewing the amazing Bee Wilson at Talbott & Arding in Hudson at 7 PM. Bee is the author of Consider the Fork, and The Way We Eat Now, and First Bite, and more!!! The event is free!
This is heavy stuff, especially about education, with walls and discipline aiding the creative process. Introducing David Zinn (to me, at least), was a big bonus. That too is a teaching moment: excellence and celebrity is not delivered by social media; it is earned with shoe-leather trial-and-error. Thank you.
Nice chalk drawings! I live in Ann Arbor and love the sudden surprise when I come across David Zinn’s chalk art. It’s a nice reminder to add a little whimsy to life and not take things so seriously….whether art, cooking, writing, being a functioning human being in this world, etc. Also, I absolutely love your advice column. Thanks for putting it out there in the world