An Excerpt from Let it Be Easy
“What grows together, goes together.”
Oh, I thought. That’s a sweet little line. And what made it even more special was the fact that I was a bit in awe of the person who said it to me.
A chef who used to work at Per Se, Thomas Keller’s famous three-Michelin-star restaurant in New York, was giving us a cooking lesson. We’d never been to Per Se because the price tag scared us — the tasting menu costs more than $300 a person — but here my husband, Heath, and I were, hanging out with a top chef. We were spending the weekend at a luxury resort called Blackberry Farm in Tennessee, a trip we’d won as a prize.
Naturally, I expected this famous chef’s cooking to be difficult and sophisticated, packed with exotic ingredients and finicky steps that were hard to execute. Should I bring a notepad? I’d wondered.
Turns out, I didn’t need to.
“People overcomplicate what makes a good meal,” the chef told us. “The best thing you can do is to use fresh, in-season ingredients, and then just keep it simple with olive oil, lemon juice, a pinch of salt.”
He smiled as he whipped up a tomato, basil, and cucumber salad, which he piled high on a delicate bone-china plate.
“Make your salads tall, friends,” he chirped. “No depressing flat salads allowed!”
It’s true, right? Restaurants serve things vertically; tall salads, tartares, ice cream sundaes. It adds to the fancy.
Could that be it? Could cooking be that simple, especially given that you pay more than $20 for a salad like this in a fancy place? Is it enough to just use what you’re given, combined with the passion and inclination, to create that comes from within?
Apparently so, because you’re given the right ingredients at the right time. All you have to do is roll up your sleeves and trust that fresh ingredients from the garden out back grow — and therefore go — together.
The chef went on to say that any onion can be used in a recipe to replace a particular type of onion listed as an ingredient. And honey and maple syrup can often be used in place of sugar. Nature is overflowing with ways to make our lives a little easier, it seems. The chef was joyful in the way he spoke as he sliced and sprinkled, using his hip to close the drawers, passing the basil around so we could all get a whiff of the summery scent. Fancy stuff can even be free-flowing and flexible.
Wow. I’d made cooking so hard by building it up to be complex. I’d grown up believing that you must sweat in the kitchen to get a good result (I mean, you gotta earn it, right?). And therefore I ended up not doing much in the kitchen at all, besides keeping my Pellegrino chilled and a bowl of pretzels topped off.
Is there an area of your life where you’re doing this? Overcomplicating something that wants to be easy? Waiting? Missing out before you’ve even begun?
As the chef spoke about five-star cuisine, it was like he was revealing some ancient truth about the universe at large: keep it simple. Nature’s creations and timing are perfect. Don’t make it hard when it can be fun. Let life be easy and good.
If ease and excellence coincide in the kitchen, where else can that be true? It turns out — everywhere.
Excerpted from the book Let It Be Easy . Copyright ©2021 by Susie Moore. Printed with permission from New World Library — www.newworldlibrary.com .
