For all of my life, my relationship with food has been important and profound. I’m not just saying that food does its normal thing of keeping my human body alive, although that is a pretty miraculous component of the relationship.

It’s more like this:

The only magazine subscription I have ever had was for Cook’s Country, a publication of America’s Test Kitchen.

When I watch television, the programming is food-based 87% of the time. The Great British Bake Off, Chef’s Table, Good Eats, and Nailed It! are my comfort shows.

Sometimes, my idea of a great day is to sit in my wingback chair by the window and read through one of my favorite cookbooks while sipping coffee and then maybe making some cookies.

One year in grad school, I read cooking blogs every day as part of my lunch-time routine, and the visiting professor across the hall would stop over to chat about the food pictured on my computer screen. In hindsight, I could have bonded with her about syntax or teaching or the job market or whatever, but I think we both needed a moment away from work-related things every once in a while.

Grocery shopping is one of my favorite chores, and I felt genuinely bereft when I had to do curbside pickup during the pandemic. I missed strolling through the produce section and just looking at all of the vegetables and fruits. There is something deeply wonderful about the organization of a produce section and the not-quite-uniformity of a pile of bell peppers, the smell of damp bundles of parsley and cilantro, and the contrasting textures of garlic, onions, and potatoes in their neighboring bins.

If you go through the camera roll on my phone, you’ll mostly encounter cat pictures and food pictures. I have three cats (two of which are extremely photogenic Orange Boys™), so the cat pictures are pretty self-explanatory.* The food pictures, though, are just as likely to be photos of the process of making the food as they are to be Instagram-worthy table settings.

This is because I’m a little bit obsessed with the concept of mise en place. Now, I am not about to wax all French chef on this blog. I have never read Mastering the Art of French Cooking and just last night I completely ruined two attempts at a crème anglaise. But I do think that everyone should consider the art of mise en place.

Mise en place is a French phrase meaning “put (or set) in place.” Basically, you organize all your ingredients so that they are ready to go into your dish so that once you start adding heat to ingredients you don’t have to pause. This can be as simple as getting all the components of a recipe out from their various storage places around the kitchen so you don’t have to go digging through the condiments in the fridge door in the midst of a stir fry only to discover that you don’t, in fact, have sesame oil. You can also slice and mince and chop all of your ingredients ahead of time so that, once the heat is on, you can slide each new ingredient into the pot as needed.

I find the entire process of obtaining, organizing, and preparing ingredients incredibly helpful. Not only do I love a good ramekin, I also sometimes need those extra steps to ensure that I don’t forget any important ingredients or important steps in my recipe. If I have all of the vegetables cut up and all of the spices measured out before I turn the burner on, the end product is much more likely to be delicious and as expected.

Sometimes I wish I could be the kind of cook that just “throws something together on the fly,” but even when I’m cobbling together a meal with whatever is left in my fridge, I really need the mise en place stage of cooking to help organize my thoughts and let me focus on one little part of the task at a time.

Example:

First, I put everything out on the counter to make sure I have all the required ingredients.

Next, I turn these Yukon golds into potato sticks, dedicating all my energy to (a) cutting only potato and not fingers and (b) making each piece as uniform as possible.

Once the potatoes have achieved the desired fry-like geometry, I toss them in olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Next step, slice this onion really thin. I can get lost in the process of transforming a boring brown root vegetable with crinkly outsides into a beautiful pile of paper-thin, nearly transparent, glistening onion shards.

I then run the mushrooms under cold water, ridding the white buttons of every dark fleck of grainy substrate. From the colander, I grab one or two mushrooms at a time, allowing myself to fall into a slightly syncopated rhythm of creating quarter-inch slices. This mushroom is bigger. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 slices. This one is a little smaller. 1 – 2 – 3. Back to bigger again. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4. A colander full of mushrooms of different sizes transforms into uniformly thick slices on the cutting board.

I mince a few cloves of garlic, measure out some flour, slice off a few tablespoons of butter, and scoop a teaspoon or so of bouillon paste on a spoon and set that on a little plate near the cutting board, all ready for gravy-making. I set out salt and black pepper, and my mise en place is complete.

Now I can finally add heat, sliding the potatoes into a preheated oven and creating a mushroom gravy on the stovetop. Since everything is all ready and waiting on the counter, there’s nothing to distract me from adding ingredients at the appropriate time and stirring everything the right amount. The onions get the perfect amount of caramelization. The mushrooms soak up the perfect combination of heat, butter, and garlic. The roux doesn’t burn. The gravy is perfectly whisked because my attention is all on this single pot on the stove and the next ingredient is already ready and waiting to be added into this mushroom poutine.

In the last year and a half, many meals that I’ve made were only edible because I took the time to assemble a mise en place ahead of time. What with graduate school, general life happenings, and a world-wide pandemic, my brain had its own sort of random shutdown in late summer of 2021. My executive functioning abilities disappeared almost completely, so it was really hard for me to focus attention on anything, much less multitask chopping one thing while another needs to be stirred on the stove. My working memory was shot so I often couldn’t remember what I was doing unless I literally had a set of instructions in front of me saying “This is the next step.” It’s nice that recipes do that for you.

Lucky for me, grocery shopping and cooking are two chores that I have actually been able to accomplish while my brain reboots. Probably because I already have trained my brain to get a dopamine rush from so many different points in the process.

See pretty piles of produce as you walk in the store?
   Reward boost!
Check items off your grocery list?
   Tiny accomplishment!
   Tiny accomplishment!
   Another tiny accomplishment!!
Your favorite chocolate is on sale?
   Extra bonus points!!!
Organize your groceries on the conveyor belt for maximal efficiency in both bagging and putting them away?
   *cue Mario Super Star music*

Setting up a visually appealing mise en place as I cook provides the same little reward bursts along the way, transforming the somewhat mundane process of baking oven fries and making mushroom gravy into a quest roadmap. Each newly sliced vegetable is an XP-boost along the way, and I can literally watch the recipe taking shape on my cutting board and in measuring dishes as I go along.

Now that my working memory and executive function are (mostly) back online, I’ve been trying to find other ways to incorporate the spirit of mise en place into other tasks beyond cooking. I was able to continue cooking and grocery shopping with a barely functioning brain because I had already established routines to break a complex process down into little steps that each provide a reward upon completion.

To that end, I’ve been thinking about what kinds of patterns I can create to make things like writing an academic paper, establishing an exercise routine, or putting away laundry less overwhelming. I will freely admit that I am currently in the trial-and-lots-of-error portion of discovering non-cooking mise en place methodologies. Some examples of pre-process preparation that I have discovered in this quest for overall better life organization are setting out workout gear the night before to take out a step in your morning exercise routine. Or putting the package you need to ship out in the passenger seat of the car so that you don’t forget to drop it off.

I must admit that the workout-gear life hack has not performed well in testing thus far. But I am looking forward to discovering new ways to help myself be productive and better organized in the future, even if my 2023 camera roll never contains pictures of beautifully folded laundry or pre-emptively selected workout outfits.

*obligatory cat tax: