Hiya friends,
Last night I had the privilege of sitting on a panel to talk about my food career. When the moderator asked us what advice we’d give to someone who wants to build a career in food media, all three panelists said some version of the same thing: Just start. Start small, start with a rough idea, start moving your ideas from your head to whatever is your medium - just start. Don’t try to make it perfect.
At the end of the evening, a woman approached me and told me about her food blog. She’s an avid home cook and she wanted to start documenting her dishes and sharing them with friends and family. But as she got going, she told me, she got hung up on making everything perfect - from the specific temp of the oven to the quality of the photos to the grammar and the measurements and - you get the idea. Eventually she burned out and took the entire thing offline.
Gah. It made me sad to hear this, because it sounds so familiar. Then she asked if I ever struggled with perfectionism and how I overcame it. I told her a short version of the story of writing My Kitchen Chalkboard, my 2018 cookbook.
My professional career has been driven by an endless curiosity about food and the ways we can use it to understand so many parts of the world around us. My graduate studies focused on food, I’ve cooked professionally, educated others, and written and edited countless recipes and stories on a range of food-related topics. But when it was time to share my own narrative, a loud, cruel voice in my head kept yelling at me. Who do I think I am, writing a book full of my stories and recipes? Your recipes are so basic. It will never be good enough. No one will like it. And on and on.
My answer to that looping internal soundtrack was to try and make the book completely perfect. Every recipe, technically sound and utterly original. Every story, brilliantly told and emotionally moving. All of the styling, as beautiful as it could possibly be.
Reader, I did not make a perfect book. Instead, I learned that the perfectionism infecting my process was really a way of hiding from the world. If I made it perfect, no one could criticize me. If I made it perfect, I’d be validated as a food professional. If I made it perfect, I’d have a chance to write another book.
Then I realized I was leaning on perfectionism because I was afraid of what would (or wouldn’t) happen when I put myself and my work out there. I (finally) finished the book. And I promised myself that whatever came next, I would override the cruel voice, ignore the fear lurking behind the need to make things perfect. I’d just start, and I’d let the process lead. And the process - of making, releasing, reflecting, seeking and integrating feedback, and then doing it all again, only better - that’s where I want to be.
Many women struggle with releasing perfectionism - patriarchy has taught us that if we’re perfect - in our work, our relationships, our bodies - that we can be accepted and find success, even power. Of course, this lesson gets undone on a regular basis when women who have “done everything right” don’t end up with the outcomes they were promised. The writer Virginia Sole-Smith talks about “The Good Girl” in a recent essay on how striving for thinness is one of the ways women play by the rules set out for us in our dominant culture:
“…it’s easy to label women as control freaks—if we’re obsessive about our diet or our workout routine or how organized our kitchen cabinets are. The Good Girl cares a lot about these things; she follows an elaborate evening skincare routine and packs perfect Bento box lunches for her children so they too can “eat the rainbow” (which is code for, eat fruits, vegetables and not much else). Taken individually, any one of these habits may be healthy, soothing, an act of “self-care.” But collectively they offer the illusion of control that the Good Girl accepts in lieu of the real thing.”
And of course, when the dominant culture writes the rules, women are bound to break them - look at Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for the presidency. She’s had to thread the needle through an impossible set of expectations - the most impossible, I’m starting to think, is “don’t be a woman.” But I digress.
This is all to say, let’s reject perfectionism and all of the stuff lurking behind it. Just start. Keep doing things. Make it messy. Take up space. Easier said than done, I know, but I feel like it’s way more fun.
(We can also take some inspiration from Ramona Quimby.)
WE ALL GOTTA EAT:
It’s true. Here’s one thing I’m cooking these days:
On the Made Fresh podcast last fall, Edible Boston publisher Sarah Blackburn shared a technique for cooking brassicas that I am officially obsessed with. Caveat: It’s a cast-iron recipe and you need two skillets.
Cut the (broccoli, in this case) into modestly thin pieces - 1/2-inch is probably fine -and heat a large cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Drizzle in 1-2 teaspoons oil. Spread the broccoli in an even layer over the surface of the pan. Sprinkle salt over the veg. Place another cast iron on top of the broccoli and cook for 7-10 minutes.
The beauty of this method is that the broccoli (or whatever other brassica du jour) gets deeply charred on the bottom, but the steam that releases as it cooks tenderizes the veg without drying it out, as often happens when you blast brassicas in a super-hot oven. Also, it’s relatively quick - I made this for my breakfast this morning and it didn’t feel daunting at all.
Have a good weekend! March, you’re up next!
XO
Leigh
This post about perfectionism SO resonates with me. It is beautifully written and deeply appreciated. And, for what it's worth, posts like this are helping me "wake up" to completely ridiculous assumptions I’ve held all my life, like: If you just “try hard enough” you won’t have to feel incompetent OR vulnerable. Oy!