Keeping a Cooking Journal (Mine's Full of Notes Nobody's Read)
Here's the thing about this lesson. It's the last one, and I've been putting it off a little, because it's less a technique and more a confession. I keep a cooking journal. Nobody reads it. It's not for anybody. And I think that's exactly why it works.
Let me explain what I mean before you decide this is a step too far for a Tuesday night dinner routine.
What I actually put in it
Not recipes. I don't write down recipes, because the recipe already exists somewhere, in a cookbook or on a card or in my head at this point after making ragu forty times. What I write down is the stuff the recipe doesn't tell you.
Things like: "Barilla, dry, at our elevation, needs about a minute less than the box says." I wrote that after timing the same box of pasta here and at my sister's place near sea level, side by side, out of pure stubbornness, because I didn't believe elevation actually changed cooking times until I proved it to myself. It does. We're at about 4,600 feet here in American Fork, and water boils at a lower temperature than it does down where she lives, so things behave differently in the pot. I wrote it down like I'd discovered something nobody knew. I hadn't. But I knew it now, for certain, in my own kitchen, and that's worth more to me than a general rule in a cookbook written by somebody who's never been up here.
Other entries are shorter. "Too much lemon in the dressing, Grandkid loved it, lean acidic on purpose from now on." "Basil died on the back step, water twice a day in this heat, dry air pulls it out of the soil faster than you'd think." "Ragu, added the wine too late, tasted like it never cooked off, wait for a real sizzle before you pour."
None of it is profound. Most of it is just me arguing with myself about salt.
Why bother if nobody's reading it
Because I don't remember things the way I think I will. I'll make something good on a Tuesday and think, I've got this now, and then three weeks later I'm standing at the stove with no memory of what I did differently that night. The journal is just me being honest with my future self, who I don't trust as much as I used to.
Here's an opinion I'll stand behind: taste as you go, and adjust for your own kitchen, because your tomatoes are more acidic than mine, your stove runs hotter or cooler than you think, and you live at whatever elevation you live at. The recipe is a starting point, not scripture. The journal is just where I keep track of what I adjusted, so I'm not starting from zero every single time.
How to actually start one, practically
You don't need anything fancy. A spiral notebook from the drugstore is fine. Mine's a composition book Joyce probably picked up during a Macey's run, and it's got a coffee ring on the cover I'm not proud of.
After you cook something this week, take two minutes, while it's fresh, and write three things:
- What you'd change next time (too salty, needed more time, pan was too hot).
- Any substitution you made and whether it worked.
- Whether anyone at the table said anything worth remembering.
That third one matters more than people think. Which brings me to the tiramisu.
I made one once, on a Sunday after church, still in my sunday best because I hadn't thought that far ahead, and I got mascarpone down the front of a white dress shirt trying to fold it into the cream too fast. Joyce laughed at me for a full minute, no exaggeration, and I wore an apron over dress clothes for about a year after that, just out of self-preservation. I never wrote down the recipe that day, but I did write down "wear the apron, you fool," and I've read that line more times than I've read anything else in that book. It's not useful information to anyone else. It's extremely useful to me.
A caution, since I'm required to be honest about these things
If you're writing while something's on the stove, step back from the burner first. It sounds obvious until you're leaning over a hot pan with a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other and you get a little too close. I've singed a page corner once. Wasn't dangerous, just dumb, and easily avoided by taking the two extra steps to the counter.
What this has to do with a Tuesday habit
The whole point of this course was never to make you into somebody who cooks fancy. It was to get dinner on the table on an ordinary weeknight without it being a production. The journal is what turns "I made ragu once and it was good" into "I know how I like my ragu," which is a different thing entirely, and a lot harder to lose.
I still can't tell you how to plate anything nicely. My food looks like a dad made it, because a dad did make it. But six months from now, when you're standing at the stove trying to remember if you salted the water enough last time, you'll be glad you wrote it down instead of trusting yourself to remember.
Before next time: find a notebook you don't care about, and after your next dinner, write down one true thing about how it went. That's the whole habit. It gets easier from there.