Why I stopped following recipes and started following frameworks

It was a Saturday morning in October. My son was two, trotting beside me through the stalls with the authority of someone who has strong opinions about produce. We stopped at the cabbage stall first — there was one so beautiful I almost didn’t want to cook it. Deep green outer leaves pulling back to reveal a heart so deeply purple it looked bruised. My son kept reaching for it. Then the fish stall, where a piece of halibut was so fresh it barely smelled of anything. Some small waxy potatoes. A lemon. Herbs grabbed on the way out.

I had not planned a meal. I had just bought what was beautiful.

That afternoon, while he slept, I stood in the kitchen looking at what I had brought home. No recipe. No plan. Just these things and a framework I had been slowly building for years without quite knowing it.

Forty minutes later there was a meal on the table that my husband said was the best thing I had cooked in months. And I had not followed a single instruction to make it.

That was the moment I understood what had changed.

For years I cooked from recipes. I still love a good cookbook — still read them the way other people read novels, in bed, with attention. But somewhere along the way I noticed that the nights I cooked best were not the nights I followed instructions most carefully. They were the nights I had good ingredients, a clear structure in my head, and the confidence to trust what I was tasting.

The recipes had given me that structure without my realising it. Absorbed over hundreds of meals, they had become something more useful than a set of instructions. They had become a way of thinking.

Two frameworks, in particular, changed everything.

This is the organising principle of traditional Japanese home cooking, and once you understand it you see it everywhere. Ichiju sansai means one soup, three sides — a bowl of miso or dashi-based broth, a portion of protein, and two or three small vegetable dishes, served with rice. It is not a recipe. It is a ratio. A way of thinking about what a meal needs to feel complete.

What I took from it was not the Japanese specifics but the underlying logic. Every dinner needs a liquid element, a protein, and at least two vegetable preparations. When those three things are on the table, the meal is balanced — nutritionally, visually, in terms of texture and temperature. You do not need a recipe to achieve this. You need a framework and good ingredients.

On that Saturday, I had the halibut as my protein. I braised the cabbage slowly in olive oil and garlic, the purple heart bleeding into the oil as it cooked, turning the whole pan a color I had not expected. I simmered the potatoes and crushed them simply with good olive oil and salt. I made a quick broth from the fish bones with a piece of kombu I keep in the pantry. Ichiju sansai, interpreted through a Marin kitchen, with whatever was beautiful that morning at the market.

If ichiju sansai gives a meal its structure, the Mediterranean tradition gives it its character. The logic is simple and old: good oil, acid, salt, and aromatics, applied with confidence and adjusted by taste rather than measurement.

The oil is almost always olive oil — I use McEvoy Ranch cold-pressed, which has a clean grassy quality that makes everything it touches taste more alive. Acid is lemon juice or a good vinegar, added toward the end, where it lifts the other flavors and makes the whole dish feel lighter and brighter. Good flaky salt goes in throughout cooking rather than all at once. And aromatics — garlic, fresh herbs, preserved lemon, za’atar — are the signature, the thing that makes a dish feel like it came from somewhere intentional.

What this framework teaches, above all, is to taste and adjust. A dish that falls flat needs acid. One that tastes harsh needs a little more oil to smooth it. One that is muddy needs salt to bring the flavors into focus. Once you know this, you can fix almost anything — and you spend less time following instructions and more time actually cooking.

That Saturday halibut was finished with a squeeze of lemon and a handful of parsley from the garden. The cabbage had preserved lemon stirred through at the end, which cut through the sweetness perfectly. The crushed potatoes were dressed simply with olive oil and a little flaky salt. The meal was clean, bright, and alive.

Here is what the framework approach actually looks like in practice.

Before going to the market or opening the refrigerator, I ask four questions. What is the protein? What are the vegetable preparations — and is there more than one? Is there a liquid element, even something as simple as a light broth? And what does the meal need to feel complete — something bright, something savoury, something green?

From those four questions, dinner assembles itself. The market tells me what is seasonal and beautiful. The framework tells me what to do with it.

The difference between following instructions and understanding food well enough to trust yourself on a Saturday afternoon with whatever looked good at the market.

My son woke from his nap just as dinner was ready. He ate the potatoes. He ate the halibut. He regarded the cabbage with suspicion, then ate that too.

Some Saturdays are exactly right.