Not Everything Should Be Optimized
I’d dog-eared it around 2004 or 2005. No cloud backup, no screenshot, just a crease that held.
The scone recipe inside wasn’t impressive on paper. No fancy flour, no chilled European butter, no step that required a kitchen scale or a YouTube tutorial. Just super basic.
Mother’s Day morning looked different from how it used to. One kid instead of three, no tray balanced at the top of the stairs, my wife sitting on the couch instead of propped up on pillows, pretending to be surprised.
I almost reached for something else. I have cooking apps and newer cookbooks. Lots of highly-rated recipes. There’s an entire algorithm designed to suggest what we should be making right now, this season, this year.
But I went back to the dog-eared recipe.
The scones came out exactly the way they always had. Not because the recipe was special. Because it had been trusted long enough to become reliable, and reliable long enough to become ours.
The circumstances had changed completely. We didn’t serve breakfast in bed. The house was quieter. But the reliable scone recipe held. And they were delicious!
There’s a version of this where I spend the morning chasing something newer, more current, more optimized, and end up with something that technically checks all the boxes and tastes like nothing in particular.
When’s the last time you went back to something that worked before it was fashionable, just to see if it still holds up?