What does my food week look like?
Some weeks are triumphs. Some weeks are train wrecks. Most are somewhere in between, tangled up in the usual chaos of work, obligations, distractions, and the random curveballs life enjoys throwing at us. The fantasy is that we control our schedules. The reality is that we're often hanging onto the bumper, getting dragged wherever the road decides to go.
That's why I believe in culinary contingency plans.
Not glamorous plans. Not ambitious plans. Familiar plans.
The dishes you can make when you're exhausted, distracted, or running on fumes. The ones you've made so many times that your hands know what to do before your brain catches up. They become muscle memory. Comfortably repetitive. Maybe even a little boring. That's fine. Boring is underrated.
But getting there takes time.
Back in 2002, when I was a fledgling home cook obsessed primarily with Korean food, I decided I was going to recreate the spinach and artichoke dip from an Italian restaurant we frequented. It seemed simple enough. Naturally, I approached it with all the planning and discipline of a small-scale industrial accident.
The result, somehow, was spectacular.
Not because I faithfully reproduced the original. Quite the opposite. Through a combination of poor planning, stubbornness, and a tendency to treat recipes like loose suggestions rather than instructions, I accidentally created something far better than what I was trying to copy.
The first attempt was a theatrical disaster. The kitchen looked like investigators would need black boxes and eyewitness testimony to reconstruct what happened. The next few attempts weren't much better. Every success came at the cost of dirtying every bowl, pan, spoon, and square inch of available counter space.
But repetition has a funny way of sanding down the rough edges.
Twenty years later, I can make that dip almost absentmindedly. I can stand at the counter carrying on a conversation while making it. You might not even realize I'm cooking. Blindfold me and I'd probably still get reasonably close.
That's the thing about practice. It's not inspirational. It's not exciting. It's just relentless repetition. And eventually, without noticing, competence sneaks in through the back door.
Lately, I've been thinking about applying that same philosophy to quesabirria.
I've made it twice now, completely from scratch. No shortcuts. No flavor packets. No birria bombs. Just white onions, guajillo chiles, árbol chiles, ancho chiles, beef, patience, and a willingness to make the house smell incredible for the better part of a day.
The results have been fantastic.
Now comes the important part: making it again. And again. And again. Until it becomes one of those dishes that lives in the hands instead of the recipe book. The kind of meal you can produce when life is pushing you around and you still want something extraordinary waiting at the end of the day.
That's the goal.
Not perfection.
Familiarity.
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