Cooking with constraints

My daily grocery shopping obsession and LA's dining funk

I had a few friends over for a small, celebratory dinner party in Los Angeles on Friday night. We went back-and-forth briefly over text asking if we should go out for a drink, make a reservation somewhere, or just stay in so I could cook. Like on so many other LA nights over the past six months, everyone hopped on the at-home option.

“Bro, did you go shopping or is this just a pantry raid before you leave?”

I was plating the last savory course of the evening, a big bowl of steamed mussels with leeks, garlic, parsley, fried shallots and toasted baguettes topped with yuzu kosho aioli. The rest of the meal included:

• A platter of ritz crackers, soft goat cheese and pickled shallots

• Sesame toast with a horseradish cream and anchovies

• A snap pea salad with hazelnuts, pecorino and chiles

• A celery salad with dates, walnuts and piave vecchio

• A trail mix of comté, dates and candied nuts

• Double fold vanilla Salt & Straw ice cream with Maldon and sherry

(I remain deeply Four Horsemen pilled).

Yesterday morning, with today’s redeye flight to New York inching closer, I started my habit of making a grocery list using the Todoist app. I did a quick lap around the kitchen, seeing what I had and what I needed to get rid of. This was my last chance to cook at home before hitting the road for three weeks, with dinner booked most nights across New York, DC and San Francisco. There was a mix of sauces and garnishes floating around, but very few staple ingredients to tie it all together. That’s intentional.

I love to grocery shop almost daily. It’s rare that I go 36 hours without a stop at LA Homefarm, McCall’s, Fish King, LA Grocery & Cafe or Whole Foods. Working from home, it’s a nice break from calls, emails and Slacks. But it also helps fuel a regular routine that keeps me motivated to cook every day and get a little better at it each time. My best home-cooked meals happen when I wake up with little to nothing in the house.

Before working in a restaurant, I’d do big grocery hauls intended to last me the next two weeks. There was this perceived benefit of stocking up on all of the essentials, having a few dishes in mind, and then being able to bang them out without needing to run to the store again. Instead, I found that:

• I got less inspired by the ingredients a couple days after purchasing them.

• I was maniacally dedicated to following recipes exactly.

• The full fridge actually made me more likely to get overwhelmed by an abundance of choice and just order Thai food.

Regularly cooking family meal for the 20 restaurant colleagues whose opinions mattered the most to me helped shake this rut. Every day, I had a ticking clock and a single shelf’s worth of ingredients. I had to spin that up into everyone’s dinner for the day. There was no opening to think through what I wanted to cook, what I knew how to cook, or what exactly a cookbook might recommend. Instead, the task was quite simple: What’s the simplest way to cook what I’m looking at while quickly building a lot of flavor?

French onion soup nachos with brown butter bearnaise

Those harsh constraints on time and ingredients honed my cooking abilities, but it also took the food to greater heights. Now, it’s the only way I cook at home. A subscriber encouraged me the other week to do a What’s In My Fridge post. I’m not trying to be that kind of influencer, so I passed, but it also wouldn’t be all the fun. On most days you’ll find:

• Lots of sparkling water near a few bottles of wine

• Eggs

• Lemons

• Plenty of bases for building sauces or flavor (tahini, butter, capers, yuzu kosho, chili crisp, miso, shio koji, etc.)

• Herbs

• Small components from previous meals, like pickles or a salsa verde

• Everything I need to make this smoothie

Every day or two, I’ll go grab whatever vegetables and protein are calling to me, trusting that I have enough goodies at home to make a meal come together. Then I’ll flip through cookbooks for light inspiration — like, oh yeah, let’s slow roast the salmon or, right, crispy chickpeas with lots of cheese sounds nice — before putting them away. Most of these go-to cookbooks encourage this constraint-filled, recipe-as-loose-guide approach to home cooking, but it took me years to grasp. It feels like a risk, and running risks with dinner is anxiety inducing.

How do I know what goes together? How do I know exactly when it’s seasoned and properly cooked? How do I know people will like it?

Since moving back to LA, I’ve loved embracing that the answer is just to try and sometimes fail. Last week, I made roasted chicken thighs with crispy, sesame butter chickpeas. I had dry brined the chicken the night before after picking it up from McCall’s. The sesame butter was leftover from another meal. Canned chickpeas are almost always in a cabinet. It wasn’t a dish I had ever fully tried before.

When I went to plate, I realized the chickpeas were soft and the chicken was unevenly cooked. I was feeling a little sick and rushing and just mistimed everything. A few years ago, with a full fridge and eyes darting to a cookbook open on the counter, I probably would have just served something mediocre or given up and ordered delivery. I had a real perfect on the first try or it’s totally wrong mentality. But that’s not really what cooking is. This time, I popped some of the chicken pieces into the oven for a few minutes while giving the chickpeas one more hard sear in a pan of duck fat. It all came together well. Not perfectly — it was a little light on acid and herbs — but that’s okay.

My oven wouldn’t go above 205 degrees from September through February. (Stay away from Electrolux). During that time, I got really good at boiling, broiling, pan frying and grilling things I otherwise would have roasted. I cranked out way more raw dishes. I made Thanksgiving duck confit in a little countertop Breville. The forced constraint was powerful.

And even during that time without a real oven, I didn’t eat out in LA more than a few times a month. That desire to stay home has only gotten more pervasive since

Emily Wilson

and I talked about LA’s quiet restaurant year in November. Something is going on out here. No one I know is all that excited about dropping $100 per person on dinner at a restaurant in one of the best, most interesting food cities in the world. Maybe it’s the perfect storm of COVID, two Hollywood strikes, the fires and harsh regulatory hoops making it an impossible market for restauranteurs. Maybe it’s a post-Ozempic, decline-in-drinking reality. Maybe we’re all too focused on vibes.

I have a lot of thoughts, but no fully formed thesis, so I’m excited to get into it again with Emily during a Substack Live convo on Wednesday at 10am PT. You can tune in here when we get rolling: