Eat the Panic Cookie
On my first day of quarantine I made panic cookies. I’ve made, like, thousands of chocolate chip cookies in my life — they were one of the first things I could throw together without a recipe when I was a teenager. I thought I was doing great that first day, I’d reorganized the entire kitchen and taken an online yoga class and didn’t miss the outside world one bit. But then I was making these cookies and I thought they seemed too buttery so I started adding more flour and then I thought I needed more baking soda to balance the flour, and then just a little more oatmeal because the bin was almost done and I wasn’t measuring anything, I was throwing things in faster and faster, and I knew those cookies would come out terribly long before they sat in tight little balls their whole time in the oven, refusing to spread.
Anxiety creeps up beneath your notice sometimes, driving you when you think you’re in charge. You do everything a little too fast and too forcefully, and you feel productive but you’re actually just high on ignoring how hard your heart is beating. It used to be easier to keep going and outrun a body that was telling us something was wrong. Now there are a million more reasons for panic and a million fewer ways to hide from it. Why not try giving it attention instead? Not to the thing that’s making you anxious (though it’s good to know what that is) but to your experience of it. What does panic taste like? What is the flavor of boredom? What is it doing to my pulse? To my thoughts?
I take a tip from our resident master of staying at home, our cat Laika. When I notice I’m rushing in the kitchen, and nothing requires my immediate attention, I put my chin on my fist on the windowsill and stare out at the street. It’s a quiet street, especially now, so mostly I’m just tracing the vines on my neighbor’s trellis, but sometimes there’s a bird (!) which is very exciting (Laika, I get it!). I notice the view and I notice my body. I do nothing for a few minutes and then I go back to what I was doing.
I promised cooking tips in the first newsletter, so here’s one: In general, do all your produce washing, peeling and chopping before you do anything else (this is called mise en place). There are exceptions — read through the recipe first! But usually when they list the ingredients like, “1/2 medium onion, diced,” they mean for you to get to step 1 of the recipe with the onion already diced (if the first step is to preheat the oven, you can do that first). Put the chopped ingredients into bowls along the way. Also! Take another bowl and use it for all the organic detritus you create, rather than leaning over trying to peel your carrot into the trash can or compost bin. Or if you want to reach home cook level 1000, put those vegetable ends into a plastic bag in the freezer, and next time you’re making soup or stew, use them for stock.
This prep-time can be quite soothing and help you to not rush. Nothing is burning or boiling over, it’s just you and your pile of vegetables and hopefully some other things that you can set up ahead of time to make yourself comfortable — good music, a clean workspace, appropriate lighting, a glass of water nearby. Make a little ritual out of getting everything ready and notice how nice your table looks with your knife and cutting board and all these fresh vegetables. You can even take a picture of it (send it to me!) if that helps you pause.
Pause and notice and look. This affects your cooking but also has everything to do with getting through this weird and anxious period we’re in. It’s okay to not be okay. Pay attention to the stories you’re telling yourself. Actually you are *extremely* psychologically healthy / you did all those years of therapy / you recently went on a meditation retreat / you just told everyone how well you’re doing / depression is not your social media brand / you’re the one who helps people not the other way around. I believe you! All of this is true. What’s also true is that right now is a different moment from all the ones before. You’re going to have to figure it out all over again. It doesn’t matter how many cookies you’ve made before, these are the cookies you’re making right now.
And sometimes you’ll screw them up. They’re fine. Just tough.
What I’m reading
No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, by Edward Espe Brown
One problem with recipes is that they blind us to the reality that nothing is fixed and that we are creating reality from scratch as we go along…When you stay with the picture in your head, looking for what fits with your recipe, you may miss the quieter ingredients that are right on hand. When you are open and curious, you taste the lettuce, savor the bread, make discoveries, and find out what pleases you deeply. You’re beginning to cook with feeling, to live with feeling. You mean it, putting your heart into it. You have some successes and some fiascoes. You do your best — and now it’s time to do something else.
Edward Espe Brown is a Zen teacher and helped to found the Greens restaurant in San Francisco. He connects a lot of the best advice I’ve read from other chefs (taste along the way!) to Zen practice. The main premise of the book is that the way to become better at cooking is through full attention to what you’re working with and how it tastes to you. It’s arranged in a series of vignettes or mini-teachings, some of which might seem a little inaccessible if spirituality is not your thing, but most of which are simple and straightforward and contain the kind of advice that feels deeply true.
I love the the way he frames cooking as a demonstration of the fact “that we are creating reality from scratch as we go along.” This is a pretty fundamental principle of Zen. You constantly practice coming back to the current moment. Cooking is a nicely practical way to do that because of the tangible dish you end up with. You have to pay attention to the ingredients you’re working with right now, since they can always be a little different from yesterday, and even when baking, variable factors like humidity may subtly affect your process. That doesn’t mean you have to memorize X% humidity means X amount of water in the pie crust. What you memorize is the feel of the dough when it’s a good crust.
When I messed up those chocolate chip cookies, the problem wasn’t precisely that I wasn’t sticking to the recipe. Even though you can never improvise with baking quite the same way as with cooking, you can adjust the amount of sugar, change the ratio of flour to oats, etc, as long as you’ve practiced enough to know how a good dough should behave. (Rising agents aren’t something you can detect in a dough, so you just have to trust the ratios in recipes there.) I knew my cookie dough was too solid, I just wasn’t paying attention.
The most important thing is to not let one bad dish stop you. Figuring out how to taste and what you like is the best part of cooking. We’ve all got this uninvited opportunity to cook a lot for ourselves, so maybe you can find one dish that you make exactly the way you like it better than anyone else in the world.