Learning not to care

It's time for the perfectionist in me to take a back seat and enjoy the ride

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I wanted to take a quick moment to say thanks to everyone who read my last installment and/or sent me messages. Honestly, the things I wrote last time are truly the kinds of things I’ve wanted to share with people for the longest time. For me, creating content has always been about connection, about being able to tell stories that speak into people’s lives. And I’m glad I was able to talk openly about my life in ways that resonated with you.

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I did a little thought experiment the other day: what would happen if I stopped caring about how I think things should turn out?

First I freaked out a bit. Then I took a deep breath and thought about what my life could look like if outcomes didn’t matter anymore. I would definitely be less stressed, and *gasp* maybe I would be happier?

I’ve been so used to planning everything that it never occurred to me that I was being overly perfectionistic and controlling. If you told me I was a perfectionist before today, I probably would have agreed but added a bunch of caveats like, “Oh yeah, but it’s only in certain situations…otherwise, I’m a pretty chill person.”

That’s definitely a load of BS. I’m not a pretty chill person. If there were such a thing as PA (perfectionists anonymous) meetings, I would attend as the classic grade-A perfectionist who’s probably as neurotic as one gets.

It’s really interesting how subtle perfectionism can be. It shows up where you least expect it. At least for me it did. The most shocking thing I discovered was that despite eating the “right” things for most of my life, I wasn’t a healthy person. My relationship with food has long been about control—knowing exactly what goes into my body, avoiding things that were considered unhealthy as much as possible, and making sure I was thin enough to look good in whatever clothes I wanted to wear. And on top of that, learning the science behind cooking unfortunately became another part of the toolkit of achieving perfectionism. I had to use the best tools and the best methods to cook and bake…otherwise, the food was considered subpar. Still edible obviously but not up to standards. So as time went on, cooking became more about getting things exactly right than about enjoying the things I was making.

I’m not saying that eating healthfully, monitoring one’s weight, or learning science are bad things. What I’m trying to say is that I let perfectionism and control become the goal, and they took away from the joy of living in the present moment.

And it’s not just food I’ve had problems with. It’s also my health, my career, my finances, my 5, 10-year plans. I had to unravel something that I think a lot of women like me struggle with: there’s this very insidious idea that we internalize—often without even being aware—that we have to do everything not just well but perfectly. We have to be the rockstar career woman, the rockstar wife, the rockstar mother, the rockstar friend, the rockstar neighbor, and the rockstar everything else all the time, 24/7. (Yes, the pressure continues even when we sleep!)

After having a lot of trouble with my mental health over the last few months, I finally had to concede that no matter how hard I try, I can’t make everything happen exactly the way I want. That’s good news and bad news, I suppose. Not being able to do everything 100% and beyond means that I can breathe and live more freely. But there’s a part of me that is still anxious that if I don’t do everything I can and more, I won’t be able to live the life or achieve the things I want. Obviously, this isn’t true, and it’s going to take time for me to embrace life instead of controlling it. But this is an experiment worth doing, and I guess the challenge is to wait and see how my life unfolds.

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Genius moves that still blow my mind

The more I cook, the less I enjoy following recipes. If I’ve never cooked a dish or if there’s something that has to be ultra precise, I do think it’s a good idea to work with something written out with measurements. But at some point with enough experience, it’s way more fun to freewheel.

So genius move number one is how I converted completely failed macarons into chocolate hazelnut praline cookies.

I was making my go-to macaron recipe for a dinner party (which luckily for me, happened to get postponed). My apartment was so humid that I just couldn’t get the egg whites to whip properly into a fluffy meringue. So rather than throw out my sad, droopy meringue, I combined it with the rest of the ingredients and improvised a cookie dough.

See, the thing is cookies are made up of basic components that have specific functions for flavor and texture. So as long as you put all of the components together in reasonable proportions, you can bake a reasonably good cookie. And if you don’t care about achieving a specific texture, you can do this in basically whatever order you want. I mixed the meringue (egg whites cooked with a sugar syrup and a little bit of cornstarch) with the almond flour, powdered sugar, and egg whites I already combined for the macarons. Then I mixed in some brown butter (cool but still melted) with 1-2 egg yolks (I can’t remember how many exactly haha), and then threw in some light brown sugar, AP flour (for more gluten structure since almond flour has no gluten), baking soda, salt, and homemade hazelnut praline.

And voila, a brownie-like cookie that’s crispy on the outside and chewy and fudgy on the inside. My husband and friends can vouch that the cookies aren’t just lookers but actually tasted good!

(As a corollary, you can grind up failed macaron cookies and make regular cookies out of those, too…I had some old matcha macaron cookies that I didn’t fill and made matcha cookies that were legit.)

Genius move number two is how I turned an inedible ramen soup into curry.

The other day, my husband made packaged Korean stir-fried instant ramen that came with an insanely spicy sauce packet. I suggested turning the dry noodles into a soup by adding chicken broth, thinking that maybe some of the fat would help decrease the burning sensations. That didn’t exactly work, so my husband took out the noodles to eat and left the soup to discard.

Except I had a brilliant idea.

I combined the leftover soup with full-fat coconut milk, then slow cooked some chicken drumsticks to make an improvised chicken curry (with potatoes added later on). My inspiration was a Southeast Asian dish I recently tried called khao soi, which is a noodle soup with a curry base and chicken or beef. The great thing about coconut milk is that because of its high fat content, it makes the spice less painful.

I don’t think I’ve been prouder of something I made than of this (maybe besides perfect macarons or yule log cake). I may just start repurposing any extra sauce for curry down the line and add other things like lemongrass, Thai basil, etc. to give the curry even more flavor.

So the moral of the story is…sauce packets can be magical, and there’s nothing too humble that can’t be repurposed into something great.

P.S. I love slow cooking meats for that extra tender, pull-apart texture. You can pressure cook them, too, if you can’t wait several hours, but the downside is less flavor gets infused.

P.P.S. Did you know that curry tastes really good with quinoa? New discovery here!

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Fun extras for the week

Thanks to science, purple tomatoes are now a thing.

I love chef and TV personality Carla Hall, and she now has her own HBO Max show called Chasing Flavor. If you love food, culture, and history, you should look into it. (I feel like this is the kind of show I’d love to be on/produce if I ever resurrect my YouTube channel or make it big.) 😂

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And that’s a wrap! Appreciate your reading my newsletter as always and your support on this personal/career journey I’ve been on.

For those who celebrate, happy Chinese New Year, and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks! 😎