Zoom out to see
Katerina Pavlakis Step back for the bigger picture
Have you noticed: Recipes are everywhere. In books, in magazines, on the web, on your phone, in your newspaper, and on the back of that packet of rice you bought.
Yet, I often hear people telling me things like: I hate recipes... Recipes never work for me... Recipes are so frustrating... If I see a recipe with more than 5 ingredients I scroll past...
This really begs the question: Are recipes really the solution to better, easier, tastier cooking?
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I think the problem isn't so much the recipes... it's the way we look at them.
We tend to zoom in, and focus on every single detail given: every ingredient, every step, every minute on the timer.
Because all these details are there for a reason, right?
Wrong!
Let's change the perspective for a moment.
Let's think of a mosaic. You know, the pretty decorative pictures and patterns made of many tiny pieces. Rather popular in Ancient Rome but still finding their way into modern day homes.
If you look close up, all you can see is random tiny pieces. If you step back and look at the bigger picture you'll see shapes and images appearing as the pattern of the pieces becomes visible.
When you look at recipes the same way, with that new perspective, everything starts making sense from the bottom up, and the inside out.
If you step back, zoom out, and look for the patterns rather than the pieces, you can start to see how all the single parts fit together in larger patterns that make up the building blocks of the dish. And if you keep looking, you'll even see that most recipes are made of those same, repeatable blocks.
Once you can recognise the pattern it becomes really easy to see how to simplify, how to tweak and how to swap. The single steps within each 'shape' (think layer) of your recipe become less important and more flexible.
Just by changing your perspective, a convoluted recipe with 15 ingredients and 25 steps can easily become a simple 3 step template.
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Not only does this make cooking easier - it also makes it more fun:
Looking for the overall pattern rather than getting tangled up in the specific details opens up plenty of space for you to play in: as long as you stay inside the blocks or layers you have identified, you can tweak, swap and experiment all you like, without breaking it.
Of course, some of those tweaks may be more successful than others (always notice and take note of what you like and what you don't) but it is extremely unlikely that you'll end up with something 'terrible': despite of what we are made to believe, cooking is very forgiving.
And the more you play, the better it gets!
Try the mosaic perspective next time you look at a recipe.
What pattern can you see when you step back and zoom out?
