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.
Emily Johnson
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.
