Wok This Way
Now that everyone is shouting “look at me!” online in obsessively curated images and videos, I’m wary of posting anything that smacks of Attention Economy excess.
On the other hand, I’ve written a book Self-Reliance in the 21st Century and more recently Ultra-Processed Life about withdrawing from the unhealthy derangements of Ultra-Processed Life.
So imagine you read these books and then discover I have a maid and eat fast-food every night. The disconnect between what I’m preaching and the way I live would be, shall we say, extremely unbecoming.
Let’s explore the “look at me!” Attention Economy for a moment.
The incentives are both financial and psychological. Having a video go viral generates always-welcome dollars, and all those likes and hearts boosts our self-worth: look, I’m somebody because people saw my post/video.
But since billions of people are also shouting “look at me!”, it’s hard to attract much attention unless you reach for some kind of extreme or excess, or can curate a “brand” that’s remarkably attractive to a wide audience.
With these incentives in place, extremes get more extreme and excess gets more excessive, curation becomes more obsessive and pretty soon we’re all exhausted by the whole thing.
In Ultra-Processed Life I discuss “aura points”:
We know all the performances are fake, including our own, and so the goal (i.e. the valued-adding proposition) is to mask our obsessive curation so cleverly that it appears to be spontaneous. If we’re caught trying too hard to present a perfect self that appears to have been captured in a random moment–that is, trying too hard to mimic a real self–then we lose ‘aura points’: the inauthentic aura we sought to project as authentic collapses.
This is the acme of hyper-alienation: we all know the performances are fake, and so the goal is not to be authentic–that is, imperfect and therefore wide open to being savaged–but to package our inauthenticity so well that it has a veneer of what’s been stripped out: spontaneity, one of the core characteristics of authentic experiences.
You see the danger here in posting anything that’s supposed to be “my real life:” is it real, or just supremely well curated to look real? Will I lose “aura points” even trying?
This “look at me!” competition places a premium on dilettantes: do something wonderful once, and then post about it endlessly.
The real world is more demanding. If you decide to exit Ultra-Processed Life and become more self-reliant, that requires making meals from scratch with real ingredients. Not occasionally, every day. No fast food, no take-out, no frozen pizzas.
If you want to learn a skill, there’s a choice: the dilettante option is to practice doing something well enough to post it online, then abandon it, as it was all for aura points.
Alternatively, you devote yourself to learning the skill to a level where it become muscle-memory, semi-automatic, always within easy reach, a level of experiential hand-on knowledge the Taoists often described as the flow of the Tao, unbidden, embedded, requiring no special effort.
I confess that I’m hard to impress. What impresses me is useful hard work and useful skills that are hard to acquire. If someone has a wider range of hands-on real-world skills than I do, I’m impressed.
I’m impressed by efficiency, no wasted motion, real-world production and flexibility: what impresses me is somebody growing hundreds of pounds of food from a small plot in their spare time. I’m impressed by people who bang out a huge volume of physically hard work with no fuss.
I’m not impressed with gourmet excesses posted online, or cutesy curations of 19th century kitchens while the costumed cook uses a KitchenAid mixer. What impresses me is someone who manages to make real food with real ingredients day after day, often after a day of stressful work.
This is the real deal, and it doesn’t translate to “look at me!” curation. It’s all about stuff that doesn’t show up in videos: careful time management, the ability to prep ingredients quickly with no wasted motion, a wide knowledge of ingredients and various cuisines, a reliance on tried-and-true but also a curiosity to try new recipes to keep things interesting.
The cook committed to only eating real food has to develop a pantry of tricks–not trick ingredients, tricks of time management: always make enough for two meals, always have a frozen serving for those times when exhaustion moots making a meal from scratch, and so on.
In other words, what actually matters in the real world doesn’t translate to videos. Real cooking skills are mostly in the prep and assembly, most of which is boring in real time.
Everything that’s valuable in the experience is invisible. When you’re prepping real ingredients, you don’t need to concentrate, your hands know the knife and what to do, so your mind is free to wander beyond the narrow strictures of goal-driven concentration–what we might characterize as the right hemisphere of our minds finally has room to roam.
It’s uniquely pleasurable to work with real ingredients. They’re amazingly beautiful if you pay attention.
It’s also a unique pleasure to work efficiently, with no wasted motion, not in a hurry but without any dallying around. No music, no TV, no distractions, just the sound of the knife on the cutting board. This is the Tao of the kitchen.
I titled this post Wok This Way because a wok is sort of a secret weapon in the real-food kitchen, for it lends itself to one-dish meals. Put the brown rice and water in the rice cooker and then fire up the wok.
The Wok is my go-to for quick meal prep–along with probably a billion other cooks. But it’s not just the wok, of course; a cast-iron skillet lends itself to one-dish meals, too.
Julienning our Northeaster green beans from the garden:
Tatsoi with mushrooms:
Beans with shrimp:
Mixed-veggie stir-fry:
We borrowed a recent cookbook by culinary star Sohla El-Waylly, and since we have cherry tomatoes and Asian eggplant in abundance in the gardens, I made her recipe for Braised Eggplant with Parm Vibes (page 170).
I adjusted a few things–reduced the oil and water, substituted Romano cheese for mozzarella, etc.–but this is standard practice in our kitchen: recipes are templates that are adjusted per what’s available and our tastes.
After pan-frying the eggplant, the garlic and pepper flakes are briefly heated and then the cherry tomatoes and water are added. The eggplant is added after the tomatoes have burst.
This is a meatless dish, but it was so rich and flavorful that if someone had told me it had meat I would not have been surprised. The key as with all such dishes is the slow simmer that concentrates the flavors.
The prep was a snap, literally a few minutes: slice the eggplant, clean a few garlic cloves, go out to the yard and collect some fresh basil leaves. Boil and drain some pasta and voila, dinner is done.
A go-to here in our kitchen when the tomatoes finally ripen is a fresh pasta sauce based on Marcella Hazan’s recipes: the tomatoes are roughly chopped up with onions and garlic, drizzled with olive oil and a bit of salt and pepper, and baked for an hour or so to reduce the veggies to slightly charred. Then they’re put in a blender and liquified. Voila, the pasta sauce is ready to serve.
And if we crave sweets, we make our own, as then we know what’s in them. Here’s a batch of Snickerdoodle cookies in process.
I have long work days. I’m tired most of the time. In other words, I’m typical. For me, the real world–including cooking–isn’t drudgery, it’s a pleasure I enjoy. And when we’re too tired, we have something we made in the freezer.
Many people seem to assume I’m online all day, available for “engagement.” Many days I’m online a few minutes (and my phone is off or on mute). My time online is extremely limited due to my real-world workload.
When we talk about self-reliance, skills, and walking away from Ultra-Processed Life, we’re talking about everyday priorities. We can’t do everything, we can only do what’s important to us.
So wok this way.
CHS NOTE: I like to think my unique background makes my work uniquely valuable, something my recent books reflect: Ultra-Processed Life, The Mythology of Progress and Self-Reliance in the 21st Century. Perhaps something here may change your life in some useful way. Please note that my weekday posts are free and I reserve my weekend Musings Report for subscribers, as writing is my only paid work/job.