Fuck Up January

Let’s start 2023 by acknowledging that everybody fucks up their food all the time. Cookbooks and Instagram and even newsletters like mine, to some extent, reinforce this idea that “good” cooks are always buying some perfect seasonal produce or really nice ingredient and then cooking it just the right way to make just what they wanted, and it’s always delicious and happens to look beautiful as well. Obviously that’s not true, but it feels true to me when I look around the Internet at other people’s food. Then I get in on the lie myself by only sharing my successes in cooking. When I do fuck up, inevitably, I’m not only left with a plate of food that isn’t quite as good as I’d hoped, but a sense of guilt and defeat, like I should know better or I should be better in the kitchen.

I don’t like that kind of self-talk. I don’t really like the whole energy of January, with its clean slate and resolutions and streaks of good behavior, which seem to me related to our fixation on perfection in cooking. Programs or apps designed around streaks try to take advantage of our natural inclination toward obsessive-compulsive purity and utilize it for our own good (actually, their own good, but let’s be generous). Not only does that rarely work in the long term — obsessiveness just isn’t a strong enough motivator for doing something you don’t want to do — but it encourages this pattern of thinking that makes you pleased when you did what you were supposed to and regretful when you fucked it up. It’s a precarious mental balance, with our sense of self-worth always dependent on what we did or didn’t do.

So for January, I’m asking myself what it would mean to embrace my fuckups more fully and openly. Can I be self-critical without causing myself distress? Can I relax into the mistakes — the burnt garlic, the underbaked cake, the overcooked noodles that have also now clumped together in the colander into a single gluey mass — and allow myself to see what happened? Not for the sole purpose of avoiding mistakes in the future, but as a kind of practice of self-awareness. It’s interesting when I fuck up. It means something happened that I didn’t expect. Is there some information that I have now but didn’t earlier? Did I go ahead and fuck up even though I knew I was going to fuck it up? What was going on, inside and outside of me, that led to this mismatch of what I imagined and what I had?

Case Study: How I fucked up beans

My Friday recipe is for a perfectly satisfying bowl of giant Rancho Gordo Royal Corona beans in a lemon-caramelized onion broth. It’s one of those recipes that’s so simple that I’m not even sure I should post it, but even this came about after several fuckups.

First, I messed up the cooking of the beans. The packaging suggests that you can soak them for 6-8 hours and then cook at a simmer for 1-3 hours. I usually soak my beans, so I did that in the morning, and then in the afternoon, I started cooking them. Two mistakes here: I didn’t use enough broth, and I let them get to too high of a boil. Actually, a third mistake: I didn’t check on them enough, which could have helped me correct those earlier mistakes. I got them going and then did an hour of yoga and by the time I took a look at the pot, they’d absorbed most of the liquid. The beans underneath were starting to get mushy and the ones on top were still not cooked because they were outside of the liquid. I added more water and then separated them after a bit, taking the cooked ones out and leaving the others to keep cooking, but ultimately the beans I ended up with were unevenly cooked and didn’t have exactly the texture I wanted.

Then, my initial ingredient pairing wasn’t right for the beans. I tasted one of the cooked beans and it was delicious. Rancho Gordo beans cost more than most others, but when you taste one, you get it. It was creamy and flavorful and I instantly knew that I shouldn’t serve it with tomato sauce and mozzarella, which was my plan. I could have changed course at that point, but I was already feeling bad about over/under-cooking the beans and I had this kind of fluttery, anxious, impatient energy that makes it hard for me to make decisions, so I dumped them in a pan of crushed tomatoes, topped it with slices of mozzarella and slid it under the broiler. The delicate bean flavor got completely subsumed by the pizza-like toppings, which were reliably tasty but not at all what I wanted by that point.

The dinner was a very minor fuckup, in that it was only the two of us and we still had bowls of perfectly nice food. I’ve made food that was way more mangled or inedible in situations where I was embarrassed to serve it, but this was just a regular everyday kind of fuckup that left me feeling unsatisfied. The next day, I bought two more bags of Royal Coronas and I’ve been eating and serving them (in the recipe linked below) relentlessly ever since.

I think the most interesting point in my beans saga was when I gave up on making something I wanted because I felt that I’d already fucked it up. I recognize this as part of a larger pattern in how I behave. Once I’ve “ruined” something, I lose energy for it, which is why all the diets and streaks and dry January stuff doesn’t work. Could I have paused at that point to reset and decide to make something different from what I’d imagined? Or was that impatient energy just what I had to work with that day, and the smoothest path was to go along with what I’d already started? I don’t think there’s a right answer, but in other similar situations (including ones with higher stakes than dinner), I’ve become interested in seeing what I do.

What I’m Cooking

Big beans in caramelized onion + lemon broth

These are the beans I wanted. Flavorful but not in a way that overwhelms the beans themselves. Hearty and comforting, but with a little freshness from the dill. Easy to make a lot of, for a dinner party or a whole week’s worth of meals. The kind of food I can eat over and over again and never get tired of.

Recipe for paid subscribers:

Big beans in caramelized onion + lemon broth