One winter in my early thirties, I lost my job and became obsessed with writing lists. There’s no better time to manically scribble extensive bulleted notes of everything you have to do than when you don’t, strictly speaking, have anything to do. The list itself becomes the thing to do.
At the time, my life lacked much natural structure, so I made up tasks that gave it shape—and I wrote them down in brightly colored gel pens. As part of this obsessive documentation journey, I began making lists of every movie I watched, book I read, and, most importantly for our purposes, every recipe I made and restaurant dish I ate.
What started as a way to impose structure became a lovely soothing ritual. In particular, to my fellow home cooks, I’d recommend keeping a recipe diary. Documenting the foods I make at home has helped me become a better cook in a few interesting ways.
In seeing what I’d eaten actually written out and amassed into a catalogue, I found that I was naturally struck by new ideas for meals and flavor combinations. On a regular Tuesday, I wasn’t going to flip through an Ottolenghi cookbook for inspiration, but I could be inspired by my own emergency meals. All laid out in one place, I could see how they played off of each other, and wonder about new directions to take them in. What if, for example, I combined the spicy sautéed broccoli I’d eaten over rice with the sweet potato and tahini I’d eaten last week? Keeping a recipe log allows you to cook from, and experiment with, your own recipes, much like you would with a cookbook you’ve become comfortable with.
The restaurant portion of the journal was more horizon broadening. Keeping a log of dishes I’d eaten out inspired me to recreate the ones I’d loved. Sometimes I’d try to recreate them in their entirety, but sometimes I’d simply steal a flavor idea, like pairing a harissa paste with avocado. And sometimes I’d copy a new-to-me technique, like cooking cabbage with a savory caramel sauce filled with mustard and parsley.
And then, there were times the journal helped me to cook more elaborately. When I hosted, I would write out my whole menu, grocery list, and a prep checklist. The journal was a useful tool for getting organized for, and excited about, a party. I’d write the recipes I’d used and the cookbooks or websites they came from, who came to dinner, and little notes about how everything went over. As the year went on, I’d repeat recipes that worked for new occasion dinners, making small tweaks that I could track in the diary with notes in the margins. It was fun and useful to have a log of the ways I’d made and changed recipes over time, and the menus I’d slotted those recipes in, so I could see how I’d evolved as a cook and which menu pairings worked best.
These bigger menu moments in the recipe log became a way to remember the times I’d hosted over the course of a year. Which brings me to perhaps the most rewarding aspect of this whole elaborate pursuit. A little over a year after it all began, I was able to look back on random days and see what I ate—and who I ate it with—remembering the small joys of coming together with people over something I’d cooked, or the nights where I was a little lonely and a pile of pasta in front of season 3 of the Gilded Age was a small solace.
Joan Didion wrote in On Keeping a Journal that, “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” What I’m here to say is that a home cook is well advised to keep on nodding terms with the sad desk lunches we used to eat, so that maybe we can make them more attractive company in the future.
Get your own food journal
I kept my own food log in a regular journal, but over the course of the past few years, I’ve noticed more specifically food-themed journals in the shoppy shops and on twee stationary websites where I love to waste my time. You don’t have to use a specific food-themed journal, of course. Any old notebook will do. But there’s nothing wrong with getting something cute with a tomato or a cherry on it.
