Pasta Milano with Shrimp, with a side of GESTALT

Yesterday I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Gary and Deanne Gute — whose classes on creativity at the University of Northern Iowa have been using Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy as a text for a couple of years now — for their new podcast, “Creating Chaos.”

They had me on to talk about how Lichtenbergianism gives people the tools they need not to fear the chaos of the universe, but to use it to Make the Thing That Is Not. One of the questions they asked me was how Lichtenbergianism applied to the non-arts world, e.g., computer programming, gardening business planning, etc. I rattled on about cocktail creation, but sitting right here was this draft of a blog post.

Watch and learn.

First of all, in our youth our favorite restaurant was The Pleasant Peasant on Peachtree St in Atlanta. (Mick’s, noted in the recipe, was the restaurant owned by the same group that took over the space after Pleasant Peasant shuttered.) Decades later we still marvel over its french onion soup, its house salad dressing, its flowerpot dessert.

This recipe, Pasta Milano with Shrimp, was simple enough that I felt comfortable to try to replicate it at home. I hadn’t made it in years, so when I chose it recently I was surprised to find that it… didn’t meet my standards for a recipe.

Right off the bat: Prepare the pasta — which takes no more than 10 minutes — then marinate the shrimp for 30? Who wrote this??

Not a problem. I was a wee slip of a 20-something when I wrote this, so it was clearly time to apply the wisdom of my advanced years to straighten it out.

(What do you mean you don’t cook dinner with a red pencil at the ready?)

In the above photo you can see where I reordered steps, added some mise en place bits, added specific cooking instructions, and generally realigned the entire recipe to match the way I cook now.

Et voilà:

Much better. You’ll notice that I rearranged the ingredients to appear in the same order as the steps in the recipe, and now the recipe flows from prep to serving. The only thing that catches my eye is the entire package of linguine for two people, but I normally dial down that amount in any recipe, so stet, as we editors like to say.

And there is a great example of how the ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS >> GESTALT >> SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION cycle works in a non-fine-arts arena.

Here endeth the lesson.