As a person who’s passionate about cooking, one of the hardest truths to accept is that not every recipe will be a clear winner. Everyone has their share of abject failures, big and small, that will obviously never be held up to the harsh, probing light of social media. If your souffle blows up in the oven, coating every surface like a layer of fresh paint, it may be funny and appropriately humbling to share, but I doubt you’d endorse that formula as if that was the desired result.
Why, then, is it so difficult to discard the merely subpar? You wouldn’t want to share the disappointment with anyone you care about, or who cares about you. Still, there’s always that nagging temptation to salvage it, to convince yourself it’s “good enough,” or that with enough caveats and qualifiers, someone else might appreciate it more than you did. Maybe it’s the sunk cost of all that time, effort, and expensive ingredients. Even though, at the end of the day, it’s just food, it still feels like a loss.
In a more concrete way, I’m talking about this spinach pesto fettuccine, with handmade pasta, no less, made and photographed over five years ago and quickly buried in the archives. I know I made it. I know I liked it well enough. Beyond that? I couldn’t tell you what made it different from any other pesto pasta I’ve thrown together over the years. I don’t have a recipe because I either lost it or never bothered to write it down in the first place. That alone says volumes. The photos aren’t much help, either. They’re perfectly serviceable, but they don’t make a compelling case for revisiting the dish. Looking back through them now, I can’t help but wonder what I thought I was trying to preserve.
Twenty years into blogging, I’m still learning to let go. Not every meal has to become a recipe, just as not every recipe has to become a favorite. Sometimes cooking is simply an excuse to spend an afternoon making pasta by hand, to use up a bunch of spinach before it wilts, or to satisfy a craving as random and urgent as the inspiration to do something about it. Some meals are meant only for the moment they’re served.
