On Recipes

Intuitive cooking, precision cooking, lasagna soup; Thanksgiving prep.

I rarely follow a recipe exactly when I cook. Most of the time, I have an idea in mind for how a dish will come together before (or, sometimes, while) I make it, and then let the actual cooking process come together holistically¹. This is probably evident from the way in which I write the recipes in this newsletter: “Chop some of this. Simmer that for awhile. Deglaze with this, finish with that.” This mentality — of vagaries and an imagined end product coming together with a degree of wonder — often yields delicious, if not entirely repeatable, results. To cook like this — what

Sam Sager

might call “intuitive cooking” — is much more fun to me than the scientific precision of America’s Test Kitchen or The Food Lab, but does require a bit more creative flexibility in the kitchen. It also requires a tolerance for results on a spectrum: Sometimes they are terrific, but occasionally, there are misfires.

This imprecision in cooking can cause a degree in agita for those who are used to a more methodical approach². Because cooking has always been so intuitive to me — learn the basics from a recipe then remove the scaffolding and go³ — I never paused to reflect on why it might be important to have a recipe, to have more than just a vague understanding of what you were trying to cook. This changed, though, after reading

Hank Shaw

’s recent post, where he opines on precision as it relates to recipes (and, in particular, to fine dining):

[Some] precision makes or breaks a dish. Especially if you’re the one writing the recipe.

Bakers know this, because an off measurement can destroy the whole loaf or cake. Brewers and meat curers understand this, too. Gram measurements only. But it’s less evident in savory cooking because, like High School Hank, we all quickly realize that good enough is good enough for most people. And if you’re cooking dinner for your family on a Tuesday night, that’s OK.

But precision is vital if you want to be able to repeat your results. And I need others to be able to repeat my recipes accurately every time, because a poorly written recipe can ruin perhaps the only elk tenderloin that person is ever going to cook.

My friend Brady keyed me in on the idea that “creativity is the ability to connect the seemingly unconnected.” And while it’s probably obvious that precision in recording recipes is connected to precision in making them, for whatever reason, I never put the two together. I’m thankful that Hank’s reflection on watching The Bear was able to make that obvious to me. It expands my toolbox, gives a bit more context to recipes that might someday some in handy — maybe even keeps one of you from ruining the elk tenderloin of which you find yourself serendipitously in possession⁴.

Not that I am going to start being more precise in my own recipe writing. That just wouldn’t jive with the idea of radical eating. When you’re constrained by the text of a recipe, you end up forcing ingredients into place, making special trips to the grocery store, when it would instead make more sense to take a look at what is in season, what you have in the pantry or the freezer or the garden, and then go from there. Like the “lasagna soup” we made the other night, on the recommendation of Auntie CWD, eMD.

She sent us this recipe from Tastes Better From Scratch a few weeks ago, raving about it deliciousness and simplicity. She also passed along the advice that it would probably be even better if you deviated from the recipe⁵ and used all sausage. Since Mrs. CWD and I had recently finished up making our own venison sausage, we figured this would be as good excuse as any to use it — so we did. But, reading through the recipe, I figured we could make some additional substitutions: the store-bought spinach with kale from our local farm; tomato paste and canned marinara sauce with the leftover red sauce we made with our venison raviolis; boxed chicken stock with homemade bone broth; etc.⁶

Whether or not you follow the recipe exactly (mine or the original) or wing it, use store-bought everything or store-bought nothing, I’m sure you can find a way to enjoy this one.

In a large stock pot, heat some olive oil, butter, or ghee over medium heat, and then brown a pound or two of Italian sausage⁷. When the sausage is cooked almost through, add an onion or two (diced) and a few cloves of garlic (crushed or minced, depending on how you like your garlic) plus some red pepper flakes. Let this cook until softened, and then deglaze the pan with a heavy pour of red wine. When the alcohol cooks off, add in a knob of butter, a can or two of either diced tomatoes or tomato sauce (and paste, if using), and enough broth or stock to thin out the soup.

Season to taste with salt, pepper, dried oregano and basil, and additional pepper flakes. If you’re using kale or another heftier green, add that in now, then let simmer for up to three hours⁸. Meanwhile, cook pasta to your liking, drain, and set aside⁹.

While everything is melding, go ahead and mix about a cup of ricotta with another cup of shredded mozzarella, and another cup of grated parmigiano cheese. Dollop that on top of the soup after you’ve ladled it into bowls over the pasta.

So there you go, folks: lasagna soup. This slots nicely into the fall menu, given it’s simplicity, it’s fillingness, and it’s warmth. My only additional piece of advice would be to — especially if you have a little Warthog at home with an insatiable appetite for meat — cook a bunch of extra sausage on the side, so you don’t find yourself fishing all the meat out of the soup to feed to him, leaving yourself with a nearly vegan meal.

With that, I’ll leave you to your Fridays. Big eating week next week with Thanksgiving on the docket, so you might want to start getting prepared¹⁰. The Family CWD will be heading over the (Hudson) river and through the (Rushton) woods to Gma and Papa’s house for a few days¹¹. If you need some inspiration on what to cook, below is the primer Mrs. CWD and I put together a few years ago. It includes everything you’d ever need to know about Thanksgiving: the turkey, the “sides,” the dessert.

As always, I invite any and all readers to send in photos of their Thanksgiving spreads or favorite Thanksgiving memories for inclusion in next week’s annual Thanksgiving Reader Round Up (see here and here for previous years photos and commentary). You can send them my way by your preferred communication method, but replying to this email or writing directly to cowwedoin@substack.com will always work.

We’ll see you back here next week with the round up.

1. The exception here is for a new recipe. For those, I’ll typically follow the steps and ingredients almost to a T the first few times, and then, if it’s good, will taper off the instructions as I get more comfortable cooking it.

For “classic” recipes — Stroganoff, for example — I’ll also often reference the recipe as I cook, even if I’m not following it exactly, just to make sure I hit the key notes required to actually call it what it us.

2. See Mrs. CWD, though she has gotten a little more loose now that she’s been cooking with me for over a decade. In college, though, I wrote a short story — mostly ripping off a Haruki Murakami plotline — about our “irreconcilable differences” in approaches to cooking leading to her abduction by a sentient squid and subsequent imprisonment in stacks of the New England Aquarium.

Don’t worry, I saved her and we came to a compromise in the kitchen.

3. I suppose this also comes from much of my culinary education coming from watching most of the first dozen or so seasons of Chopped in rapid succession during and after college.

4. I’m looking forward to my (hopefully soon) Montana elk hunt with my friend Matt from NBB!

5. Radical!

6.

Casey B. Head

recently remarked about trying to reduce the percentage of his calories which come from the grocery store. I’ve had this in the back of my mind ever since reading it. We do a pretty good job with this — probably between 50-75% of our calories are either home-made, home-grown, self-harvested, or bought from a local farm or farmer — but we can always do better.

This soup was pretty good on that front: only the canned tomatoes, dry pasta, and cheese were from the grocery store — everything else was either from our farm and farm share, saved from our garden, or the deer I shot last month (though the seasonings and pork fat used to make the sausage did come from Savenor’s butcher shop). That puts this meal at close to 75% “radical calories.”

7. We used a slightly modified version of this Roasted Garlic & Sage Venison Sausage from Wade Truong at Elevated Wild — which is phenomenal.

8. If you’re using spinach, add that just before serving.

9. The original recipe calls for cooking broken lasagna noodles in the soup itself, but I find that 1) breaking up lasagna noodles is a pain, and 2) when you cook pasta in the soup, it releases too much starch and makes the soup too gummy the next day. Plus, you can’t control the doneness of the noodles — and I like mine al dente.

10. I mean that both by working on your Thanksgiving menu and doing some pre-emptive prep, but also preparing your own stomach by gradually acclimatizing it to more-and-more food over the next five-to-seven days.

11. With a brief stopover (not to be confused with popover, but I don’t think anyone would mind putting down a few of those) at Tante und Onkel CWD’s in New York. I just hope Die Cousins CWD are ready for a slumber party!