For me, I feel like we lose the point of cooking. We’re so stuck in the recipes and what to do and the quantities of everything that you forget that cooking can be this super intuitive, relaxing process that doesn’t have edges around it, but is this ambiguous thing that flows into the next thing.
When I cook at home I very rarely follow recipes, it is more about feel and taste but also what I have on hand and want to use up.
Something that I try to convey in my recipes but is admittedly very hard to articulate is the intersection of intuition and thrift and laziness in home cooking [...]
Anyway I'm always pursuing the idea that one meal can flow into the next and the next, building flavor but also feelings and memories, instead of fixing hermetically sealed little meals that just make 1-2 portions, but instead big batches that evolve over time, richer and deeper meals that carry a literal trace of the meal you had before it.
[...] I remember eating many lunches at Moosewood in Ithaca and seeing how Monday's salsa became Tuesday's marinara became Wednesday's ribolitta, which is also how any decent line cook will interpret leftovers into a memorable family meal.