Only by tasting can you learn to connect the decisions you make with their outcomes.
[Taste, listen, smell, touch, and watch as much as possible.]
I cook mostly with my hands: they’re calibrated, by now, to turn things at the right moments, to choose correct amounts of salt. They seem to know before I do when to stop squeezing a lemon, or how much parsley to grab.
Ingredients don’t take three or five or ten minutes to be done; it depends on the day and the stove.
While your oven is lit, use its heat thoroughly. When a pan of vegetables comes out, replace it with a toaster tray of walnuts or almonds. They will be perfectly toasted after ten minutes or so and can be stored in the refrigerator for months and used in vegetable salads, added to pesto, or snacked on. Or scatter stale bread in a little pan, drizzle it with olive oil, and make toasted breadcrumbs or croutons.
If you can’t find anything to fit into the spaces vacated by roasting vegetables, use the oven’s heat once everything is out. Let it warm your dinner plates, or the meal’s bread. Use its ambient heat for loosening vinaigrette that’s hardened in the refrigerator, softening a stick of butter, or mixing pasta with cheese.
When you don’t taste heat first but instead the sweetness of cauliflower or beet, the prickliness of vinegar, or tingle of good olive oil, it is flavor, not temperature, you experience.
All cooked vegetables, whether boiled or roasted, become wonderful salads. They need only a handful of toasted nuts, chopped fresh herbs, a few vinegar-soaked onions, and a sharp vinaigrette. It’s really all most food ever needs.
By the end of the week, you will have eaten vegetables a dozen ways a dozen times, having begun with good raw materials only once. You will also have had a number of satisfying conversations. You will have eaten a raw bite of kale stem and wondered whether next time it should be pickled. You’ll have tasted a particularly soft, cold, vinegary beet, and realized you wanted to make beet soup again and serve it cold. You will have been silently practicing that ancient conversation in which cooks and their materials used to converse, feeling out unfamiliar conjugations, brushing up.
The bones and shells and peels of things are where a lot of their goodness resides. It’s no more or less lamb for being meat or bone; it’s no more or less pea for being pea or pod.
Find a turnip that missed the week’s roasting, asparagus bottoms, cabbage cores. As long as a soup’s ingredients are born in the same season, they will meld together perfectly in a pot and can then be blended until creamy. If there is a final cup of cooked beans or lentils that needs somewhere to go, once you’ve blended it this sort of hodeepodgey soup is the place.
The amount of food you have left from a meal is always the perfect amount for something.
Good olive oil gets bitter when it’s broken by blades.
[Cook all your veggies together once a week and keep them ready to incorporate during the week. Crispers are useless. Maximize your oven or re-use your boiling water.]
[While the oven is pre-heating, prep your veggies from longest to shortest cooking time.]
[When roasting different vegetables, pair the ones thay grow most similarly: keep together roots, stems, tubers. Beets are their own thing.]
[To poach an egg: boil and simmer four inches of water; add a bit of vinegar; crack the egg onto a cup and pour into the water; after a minute and a half, lift with a slotted spoon and prod a bit to check; drain and store in ice water; reheat in simmering water before serving.]
I usually have at least one nicely cold soft-boiled egg on hand to lure my thoughts away from eating lunch out.
[Cooking seems like something to juggle amongst life’s many complications rather than a clear path through them.]
[Fast-and-easy recipe books try to sell us akin to ‘breathing air more rapidly’ while pasta is already ‘boil then toss’ and omelettes are already a minute away.]
[Cooking is transformation, and transformation is human.]
[Absurd to think that nature starts from scratch at dawn: cooking as well is continuity, picking up where something else left off.]
Stale slices of bread should be ground into breadcrumbs, which make a delicious topping for pasta, and add crunch to a salad. Or they must be toasted and broken apart for croutons or brittle crackers, which ask to be smeared with olive paste.
This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking. If we decide our meals will be good, remanded kale stems, quickly pickled or cooked in olive oil and garlic, will be taken advantage of to garnish eggs, or tossed with pasta. Beet and turnip greens, so often discarded, will be washed well and sautéed in olive oil and filled into an omelet, or served on warm, garlicky crostini. The omelets or little toasts will have cost no more than eggs and stale bread, and both will have been more gratifying to eater and cook.
If our meal will be ongoing, then our only task is to begin.
if there is anything that you can learn from what is happening, learn it.
[Adding salt is more than just about boiling: it’s a way to cook one good-tasting thing inside another.]
[You already know how everything is supposed to taste: it should be ‘good’. And that’s as true for water as any other ingredient.]
[Add ingredients together warm, as they’re already transforming and open to change.]
[Push re-use of water by moving from less starchy to more starchy ingredients.]
[Taste the broth often and cook until delicious.]
[A given name like ‘honour killings’ portrays that violence as somehow different than in the occidental nations: more barbaric and primitive. Is ours any better?]
[1. What is the difference between hearing and endorsing a dangerous idea? 2. Should we hear them or not, and why? 3. Is it possible to discuss them productively?]
[Strengthening an argument doesn’t make it more threatening.]
[Appreciate disagreements; notice and address anxiety.]
[Systemic issues stick when their disagreements are stuck in unproductive states or off limits of discussion.]
I changed the game from “online debate” to “potluck at my house.” I changed the goal from “let’s debate ideas” to “let’s enjoy each other’s company while having a stimulating conversation.” I changed the conversational medium from “type into a comment text box” to “discuss over food and drink.” And I changed the question from “What do you believe?” to the biggest unanswered question in my own head: “What’s the endgame for the gun-control debate?”
[By realizing that we knew less, we felt somehow wiser.]
A traditional essay makes a single case and puts all its weight behind it. A problem brief collects the best proposals [and criticisms] that attempt to answer the open question. That means it might have two or five or a hundred different proposals, each with supporting evidence and proposed actions, each a result of a collaboration between supporters and opponents.
[Focus on end-games instead of arguing specific points.]
the low doorway is meant to remind guests to enter with respect.
[To any disagreement, you can ask: What’s really at stake here? If true, what happens? What truth would cause you to change your mind? If this were no longer a problem, how would we get there?]
[‘Nutpicking’ is to select the most extreme viewpoint so that it’s easy to tear apart; an empty victory that invites another cycle.]
[Consider helping the opposition build their strongest arguments and enlist them to build up yours. Iron sharpens iron, and each of you is best suited to find flaws in the others’ approach.]
[We’re easily blind to the loopholes in our own desires.]
[Even if one side wins through power, do they really expect the other side to simply shut up about it forever?]
What is your relationship to the unknown? What is it like to have sensitivity to nature and spirits?
[Reason habituates us to asking black-and-white questions like “what is real?” and “what actually happened?” when actually there’s no need to go there, to the point that some people feel a sense of duty to correct others who believe in something considered unacceptable.]
[Ghosts are more heart-realm metaphors than head-realm beings.]
To ask a good question, walk right up to the perimeter of your current understanding about something and find a question that you don’t know the answer to.
[Instead of “are ghosts real?” ask “what experiences led you to your beliefs?”.]
It’s amazing to have a chance to peek into someone’s belief systems and memories, a treasure trove wasted by a bad question.
[People don’t need to answer, or do so truthfully.]
[Open and honest dialogue requires the information shared to not be weaponized.]
[The fruits of disagreement include: 1. security (negotiating for foundation); 2. growth (taking risks to discover new possibilities and potential security); 3. connection (being able to relate to people with diverse perspectives); and 4. enjoyment, learning to enjoy fundamental disagreements because the discussion brings new nuance each time.]
[Going beyond battling for security diffuses the zero-sum game to enable everyone to gain and grow from the experience.]
[The voice of reason makes sense of things by connecting to all the other things that give authority and power to its wielder.]
[Ghosts and spirits are a more a language to talk about unknown forces that influence us and less a physical being that we can’t interact with.]
[The voice of possibility doesn’t need to immediately decide whether something is true, and can accept contradictory arguments simultaneously.]
[Propose to ‘disagree and commit’ when nobody will have the ideal information anyway, especially if reversible. Try to recognize misalignment and correct quickly.]
[Leader seek to have strong judgment and good instincts. They incorporate diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.]
[When resolving conflict, the voice of power uses force, the voice of reason uses systems, and the voice of avoidance uses inaction. The voice of possibility tries to make conflict productive instead, by facilitating learning, curiosity, understanding.]
[Depersonalize points of view so that people feel free to try out other ones. Plot them on a quadrant of agreement against potential to change.]
[Arguments are an indication of something important, not necessarily bad. It’s normal for them to come back like weeds. Not dealing with them to ‘avoid rocking the boat’ can create anxiousness underlying everything.]
[Try to determine whether it’s about being true, meaningful, or useful.]
[Recaps can help ease tension contours after intense learning.]
[If you teach well, people might pay you to help them with things you’re skilled at, even without expertise.]
[Putting people in a group or course would yield better outcomes when they have been vetted to have similar needs that can be addressed by your offering. The transactional ‘buy and enroll’ misses this opportunity.]
[Living documentation that everyone can access. Many people have talked about doing it, but you actually do it in a relational way. Nice reminder of the beauty created through that process. No logic or reason behind it, other than connection, recognizing that something cool is happening and doing it.]
Poorly dressed in other folks’ old clothes, with a dog and a noisy borrowed bicycle, I’d see half the eyes in the room wish they hadn’t come the moment they realised that it was me giving the workshop. ’this is the guy?!’. Some would quickly look away as if to hide the way their faces openly displayed their shock. I quickly learnt to play off of that, and to enjoy it too; it was the first tension contour to resolve! Knowing that I would resolve that tension, I could enjoy it, a little like sitting in front of a big cake you know you are about to eat, and waiting a little!
[Problematic learners can become observers. Problematic rapports in one-on-one might work out better in a worokshop setting, or in an audio course. Terminating a relationship with the student can still maintain their engagement with the method.]
[Bear with difficult learners as long as they help illuminate deficiencies in your method. Try to convince them to play ball, but ultimately leave the choice with them.]
[Explaining etymology can help mask repetition.]
[Moving at the speed of trust.]