Cooking is something I first got interested in when I was a teenager. My first real job was a brief (3 weeks?) stint as a dishwasher at a Pasta House in Creve Couer. And ever since that and an illness that had me watching too much Giada Di Laurentis, being good at cooking is something that I’ve always vaguely wanted to be. Once I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential as a younger man, I knew I wanted to be a part of the international pirate’s fraternity of people who cook, identifiable by their lovingly mangled hands and warm, wide smiles. But there’s a really important point here: I sucked. For most of my cooking career, such as it is, I really sucked. This dish helped turn that around.

We had gotten a cast iron skillet as a wedding present. I knew cast iron as that thing my grandmother Jackson had to threaten her brood with when they misbehaved. It was not something I knew how to use, and my aversion to the oven had everything to do with lack of access to one. I was excited to see what I could do with it.

After several furtive attempts at steak (smoke filled kitchen, charred, and undercooked), I looked in a different direction. I found this recipe, and patiently worked on it.

Ingredients

1 large sweet potato, peeled and cut in to 1/2” cubes 1 bunch of Kale, shaved or chopped finely 4-8 ounces of goat cheese (we, um, like more in ours). Pecorino Romano or Parmesean Cheese, finely shredded 1 package of Gnocchi olive oil, salt and pepper

Recipe

  1. Toss the cubes of sweet potato with olive oil, salt and pepper, and spread evenly on a baking sheet
  2. Par Roast the sweet potato in a 350 degree, pre heated oven for 15-20 minutes until tender.
  3. While that’s roasting, cook the Gnocchi per package instructions, drain and rinse.
  4. Combine Gnocchi, kale, 1/2 of the Pecorino, the goat cheese and par roasted sweet potato in a large bowl until everything is covered in cheese and melty.
  5. put the melty goodness in to the cast iron skillet, put the skillet into oven for an additional 12-15 minutes.
  6. top with rest of Pecorino
  7. Prosper as your family actually enjoys kale for once

This dish combines a surprising amount of basic kitchen skills, and is really difficult to mess up - the goat cheese is a giant safety net, flavor wise.

While miserable, laborious, and seemingly inscrutable, the French method of training cooks - dishwashing to peeling vegetables to cutting vegetables to making sauces to preparing fish and then land based proteins to the fry/saute line to the oven and broiler and finally to assembly and check - is still a valid method. In a dish this simple, you can see how the skills fit together in a coherent, organized, efficient manner.

Whether it’s been cooking or coding or any other thing I’ve learned to do well, the kind of practice that has helped me the most is not really building something out of a kit (ahem, blue apron for cooking or treehouse for development, for example), but by practicing the skills required for the tasks over and over and over again. I’ve found several things.

First, that in order to be effective, there’s a large degree of “want-to” that has to be present. Anytime rote practice like this was forced on me, I rebelled. Now, that’s the folly of youth, but more accurately, it’s also my ADHD inattentive coming through. I am capable of knuckling down, but crucially I have to want to knuckle down. In a recipe this simple, there’s no choice - there’s not a lot of room to do anything except the basics.

Second, there’s a basic fluency and efficiency that results from repetition. Particularly, from repetition of rote tasks that don’t necessarily ape the real world application. If you want to do more, you have to do more. But there’s a cost to specificity. You need a wide base of neurolomuscularly automatic general patterns in order to combine them into more sophisticated, specialized skills. In this recipe, you get practice with vegetable shopping, Mise en place, vegetable prep, kitchen timing, and oven skills in low-stakes environment. As you try new and more sophisticated dishes, these skills become crucial.

Last, you get some perspective on what good actually means. Yes, it’s fun to read Bourdain, or drool over Gordon Ramsey’s food, or marvel at Mina Markham’s code. But what you don’t see when you focus on fun is all of the boring, day-in day-out work it took to get there. When you make a recipe like this, over and over and over and build that confidence, you can learn and appreciate the kind of work it takes to produce something truly outstanding, and maybe, even possibly something seminal.

This simple dish was one of the first things that became one of our dishes. This dish helped me level up as a home cook, and shed light on the work of learning.