Anything

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

— Tom Waits

Most of your meals come in three forms: salad, sandwich, soup. Why is that?

I think it’s about decision fatigue. When you try to reduce the world of options, ingredients and nutritional objectives into an easily digestible experience, you want someone else to boil it all down for you and present the infinite variety in the form of low-touch convenience. So that you can feed yourself with one hand and scroll with the other.

With salad, your food is delivered by forkfuls from a container. With sandwich it comes by bites of a deliberately arranged salad wrapped in bread. With soup it flows into you by spoonfuls from a bowl, or sips from a cup. But all three are really a trail mix with more perishable ingredients, that we agreed to call a meal.

Somebody performed that reduction for you. And the moment you accept the container, you submit to the authority of whoever made your food. Anything they’ve done is good enough. Anything they chose to put in. Any decisions they made along the way. You’re consuming their content, scrolling through their soup.

And sometimes it’s your turn to shoot the reel. I’m here to help.

If you can read this you can make a salad and you can make a sandwich. You learn it the same way we learn to speak and write: by reverse engineering the combination of the whole that we want from the parts that we have.

Soup is a salad gradually immersed in boiling water over a period of time.

Everything was the crowd problem — feed the oven and the oven feeds the crowd. Anything is the ordinary Tuesday: one person, one pot, and dinner still has to happen. I’ll show you one and you’ll know them all.

Chicken soup

Add a splash of oil into a pre-heated heavy-bottomed pan. Add chicken drumsticks and chopped onions. As they are browning all over, think of the spices you want to add to the oil before the water comes in, so that spice-infused oil passes your plan on to the water that comes next. When they are brown enough for your taste, add the spices, and then add boiling water. That completes the first, optional phase: pre-browning. If you had other aromatics in there — ginger, garlic — I won’t blame you.

The reason I love starting a soup with pre-browning is that it gives you the most natural intuition about volumes and ratios. For things to brown, everything has to be in one layer. So if you added four drumsticks and one onion, it would leave space for carrots and celery sticks to brown along. Six drumsticks could have eliminated the full mirepoix option. Try both ways and see what you like more.

Because in the second phase you will be adding denser ingredients: chopped parsnips, carrots, celeriac. You can throw in some grains or lentils at this stage as well, or potatoes. The big boil is not optional. That’s what makes soup a soup.

How much water? Half to two thirds of the full volume of the pot, depending on your taste in soups. Do you like them watery or substantial? Find your balance over time. But most importantly, resist the temptation to overload the empty volume with too many solid things. Add stuff by handfuls, not bowlfuls.

You see, besides water, the biggest void in our kitchens and our diets is air. The lack of it. We have everything, and while we’re at it we want to chop it all up and throw it into the boiling pot now. Resist this temptation and you will end up with an awesome soup. Just like with the trail mix, letting people taste all the things you did not put in this time is the real gift of your soup making service.

The third phase starts around the time you turn it off, cover it tight and let it cool down slowly. That’s when you add chopped herbs, crushed garlic, olives, smoked meats, or really any good thing your rabbi, your budget and your taste would allow. But whatever you do, leave that little bit of extra space between the top of the soup and the lid. The empty space. We will talk about Nothing in the next chapter, but you can start getting ready now.

The compliment

I would like to finish this with the ultimate pickup line — a compliment you can say to someone you’ve known for decades or for five minutes. As I said in the epigraph, the way you do anything is the way you do everything. You know a person by the way they bother, optimize, balance ebb and flow. And you know you want to share your Everything with them from the way they do Anything.

So what do you say to that special one?

I miss your soup.