KISS, or Keep It Simple Stupid is an acronym that you can refer to when you feel overwhelmed in life or in the kitchen, just not while contemplating how to travel to space. In a world where Instagram yachts and tik tok posts dominate, I get urges to backlash against it and go to a simple time where cell phones where never at the dinner table and people actually knew how to interact with each other in person. I do enjoy scrolling down and seeing what everyone else is doing in their perfectly curated lives, (thanks Insta), but need to take time for experiencing the “right now” as well. So much information being thrown at me at once makes me feel overwhelmed and overpowered. While being perfectly content in my own world and my curated life path, constant digestion of content makes me feel that I need it more in life and creates a sense that more is more. I realized that many times when I cook, even on a daily level I follow the same principal that more is better, which it isn’t.
Food, like life, can become very complicated. Sometimes items with few ingredients, such as sourdough bread or croissants, require patience, time, effort and technique. A particular cultures food, such as a Greek stew or Indian dahl require a ton of ingredients that are layered, mixed, mashed and transformed. Once you bite into any piece of food your brain is communicating both with your gut and your taste buds to make sense of what you are consuming, how it will be digested and distributed through your body, and of course there is the pleasure aspect to eating which is only recent in our evolution.
A recipe that is complicated can taste amazing, but so can heirloom tomatoes with a drizzle of olive oil and salt. In having a food blog, you have the pressure and the need to develop and create these recipes that sometimes are not even accessible to the average person that doesn’t live in New York City or wants to spend an hour cooking for a family, something that I try to be mindful of here at Toasty. While I love to explore and experiment in the kitchen, like life everything must be balanced. The multi- ingredient recipes will still be up there, sometimes with short cuts and sometimes requiring a few days, but so will simple and easy recipes, like this apple one, because some days you just want the basics and to enjoy what nature gave you.
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