A few years ago I started noticing a bunch of cooking books and articles exhorting me to stop cooking from recipes. It was no longer enough to cook, you had to cook freely! with improvisation! and not be one of those awfully uncool and un-free people who cook with recipes all the time.

Right, okay. This ended up not helping me cook without recipes, but instead making me feel uncool and repressed for cooking with recipes. I felt a touch defensive about it.

I am not going to guilt you about cooking with recipes. Lord knows, I cook with recipes. And I like cooking with recipes— they help me try new things, techniques and ingredients and flavor combinations that I would not have thought of on my own. Having let the whole no-recipe thing marinate for a few years, however, I will say that there is something to building your confidence in the kitchen so you feel comfortable throwing things together without feeling yoked to a recipe. There are real benefits— it can be hard to find a recipe that matches exactly the ingredients you have at home and level of effort you’re willing to put into dinner. Maybe it’s hot in the kitchen and you don’t want to turn on your oven to roast vegetables. Maybe you need to do something with that fennel before it goes bad.

But even if you can appreciate the value of cooking without recipes, there’s the whole issue of getting from point A to point B. If you only cook by following recipes, it’s not so easy to suddenly decide to stop cooking with recipes.

This is not something I’m super good at, by the way, but here’s what’s helped me: understanding what the recipe is telling me to do. And I mean not just the individual steps, but component pieces or processes. Macaroni and cheese, for example, involves making a white sauce (béchamel), adding cheese, combining the sauce with pasta, and baking the whole thing. Cauliflower cheese involves making a white sauce, adding a cheese, combining the sauce with cauliflower, and baking the whole thing. Tuna casserole is a white sauce, to which you add tuna and pasta, and bake. Give or take some breadcrumbs and herbs, swap in or out onions or leeks or shallots— most casseroles involve a variation of this process.

Start paying attention to the overall processes in a recipe. It’s like breaking up a phone number— it’s very hard to remember a string of ten digits, but it’s not so hard to remember a set of three digits, plus a set of three digits, plus a set of four digits.