I can’t get started if starting isn’t easy.

See, I’m a perfectionist. If I’m not 100% sure I’ll get it right I am already inclined not to try it at all. If it’s tough on top of that, trying is unlikely. Maybe you’re the same. Maybe you came from the town of “the-world-will-come-to-an-end-if-you-screw-up”, USA? That place sucks.

I didn’t really even know I had a problem until just a few years ago. I thought I was normal. Normal with blinding headaches, chronic tight shoulders and neck and as a child I could barely digest food (that reversed itself, big time! 🙂 ). It took forever for me to figure out I had an advanced case of being too hard on myself. And it’s weird because that’s not what I come from.

Brings me to my mother and every generation before her. They all cooked and baked by feel. Pinch of this, pinch of that. Eventually it was me baking by myself and it was easy to rely on cookbooks. I never learned to do things by feel, I only trusted the manuals. But now I have this overwhelming need to teach myself how to function like my mother did. Because when she did what she loved it was with abandon and joy, trusting that the results would always be great.

So, I need to make my cooking and baking easy if I’m ever going to learn to trust my instincts. And just like when I made my pizza crust and subsequent overloaded pizza a short while back, kitchen rules are never just about what’s going on in the kitchen. Trusting my instincts is something hard for me that I need to make easy.

I love Outback Steakhouse’s Blue Cheese Wedge Salad because it’s simple and delicious. It’s a quarter of a head of iceberg lettuce on a plate studded with cherry tomatoes, bacon, red onion, blue cheese dressing and a balsamic glaze. That salad was my introduction to the balsamic reduction and my life hasn’t been the same since.

I love reduced balsamic mostly drizzled over a toasted baguette smeared with creamy goat cheese and topped with tomatoes. Heaven. The key is you simmer that vinegar in a little saucepan until it coats the back of the spoon like liquid gold (or crude oil). Much longer than that and it will all burn and make you cry. But if you time it just right, you end up with a black, syrupy brew that’s tangy and sweet and that you will want to eat with a spoon. Don’t do it. Do it!

Anywhoo…

I don’t get to the restaurant that often but I crave the salad sometimes. So I went to my favorite place on the web, Pinterest, and found a copycat recipe. Not as easy as I would have liked. Truly, I think the key to the deliciousness of this salad is the dressing and the balsamic. Not the bacon. It would be almost as good even without the bacon (that’s not a theory I’ve actually tried, I’m just trying to make a point). And while the recipes I tried were okay, there was nothing all that special and yet they took a lot of work.

So I made my own dressing recipe to easy it up. I appreciate a good, crunchy, refreshing fill up of iceberg lettuce but there is absolutely no nutritional value. So I swapped out the iceberg for spring mix. Maybe not much more nutrition but it’s something. Give me a break. I’m trying.

Bottom line, it’s okay to wing it in the kitchen and okay to wing it in life. Perfectionism will kill you dead. Honestly, embrace the un-perfect and lose the tension headaches.

So here’s my “Un-Wedge Salad” recipe as written from memory because I forgot to write down all the details as I was making it. But my way is easy. Frankly, there’s really not much to my blue cheese dressing because as long as it tastes like blue cheese I’m good. I’m a simple woman with simple needs.

What about you? Are you a perfectionist or do you do easy-peasy?