Cooking notes

9 posts

This isn’t a book of destinations. It’s a book of movement.

Cooking, for me, has never been about arriving at a fixed point — the perfect dish, the flawless method, the finished plate that never changes. It’s always been a journey. One shaped by curiosity, repetition, mistakes, small breakthroughs and moments of real connection with what’s happening in the pan.

Recipes are part of that journey, but they aren’t the whole story. What matters more is learning how to see — how heat behaves, how ingredients respond, how timing shifts depending on mood, weather or instinct. Once you start noticing those things, cooking stops feeling like something you either can or can’t do, and starts to feel like something you actively participate in.

That’s what lives beyond recipes. Not rules, but awareness. Not perfection, but progress. A way of cooking that evolves as you do.
Think of this book less as a set of instructions and more as a companion. Something to dip into, return to, argue with, adapt. A collection of ideas, techniques and ways of paying attention that you can carry into your own kitchen, in your own way.

Cooking is a journey without an end point. And that’s the joy of it.
I’m sharing recipes with you — but I’m also going to ask you to pay attention as you cook.
Alongside the instructions, I’ll ask questions. Those questions matter. They’re there to help you become a more intuitive cook, not just someone who follows steps.

I do this because recipes don’t always work. Sometimes they’re badly written. More often, it’s because ingredients behave differently depending on their age, freshness, quality and how they’ve been handled. Then there are the variables no recipe can control — the temperature of your kitchen, the heat of your pan, the mood of the day.

Take lemon juice, for example. A lemon almost never tastes the same twice. If you follow a numerical measurement blindly, without tasting, you risk throwing a dish off balance — either because the acidity overwhelms everything else, or because it never quite shows up at all.

So follow the recipes, but trust the questions that sit alongside them. Taste as you go. Pay attention to what’s happening in the pan. Adjust when something feels off.
Those questions are there to help you succeed — but they might also make you a better cook along the way.

- Cooking notes

A different kind of cooking

Oboe is a collection of thoughts I return to when I’m approaching cooking. The way I cook changes…

johnpev@gmail.com

December 25, 2018

- Cooking notes

Do this before you cook

When cooking feels stressful, it’s rarely because the recipe is difficult Cooking is unpredictable. Things can and do go wrong. When people start cooking while they’re still preparing — chopping, measuring, searching for tools — reaction time disappears. That’s when small issues turn into big problems and all the joy drains out of the process.

johnpev@gmail.com

November 9, 2018

- Cooking notes

Pay attention

I think it’s important to move you away from simply following recipe methods. In many cases, they quietly undermine people’s chances of becoming confident cooks. Most methods focus almost entirely on the what — quantities, timings, steps — and very rarely on the why. But it’s the why that builds confidence. Without it, when something goes wrong, it feels personal. Like you’ve failed. When in reality, cooking is about responding to variables, not executing instructions.

johnpev@gmail.com

October 14, 2018

- Cooking notes

The magic of a perfect pork chop

The smell of caramelised pork and its fat is hard to beat. As you cook this beauty, you’ll get a number of opportunities to inhale that smell and see the juices and the burnt fat come together in the most incredible way to create the tastiest pan sauce.

johnpev@gmail.com