Do you trust yourself?

My lips were nearly Real Housewives-eligible by the time I’d realized my mistake…

On Sunday, I made my weekly trip to the Farmers’ Market to stock up on the essentials:

Kidding, kidding — after Ryan and I devoured these pastries faster than Hogwarts’ vanishing cabinet could go?poof!, I set out on my weekly mission to find something seasonal to turn into a fun little cooking project.

This week’s find: tomatillos.

I grabbed a jalape?o, cilantro, garlic, and yellow onion from the Amagansett farm stand where I found the tomatillos and headed home to whip up roasted tomatillo salsa.

But instead of diving in and making the salsa the way I know I have to… I looked up a recipe. The same one I’ve made a thousand times.

I have this really bad habit —

Sometimes I don’t trust myself.

I’ve been cooking since I was ~5 (hello, kid of a single mom in med school) and yet I?still?don’t cook things I’ve made a thousand times without consulting (and re-consulting) the recipe I know like the back of my hand.

When I follow a new-to-me recipe that calls for you to do/not do something that I know in my gut isn’t right… I struggle to override their instructions.

?? Which is exactly what happened with this tomatillo salsa — and let’s just say, I’ll be paying for it for a while.

I know — deep in my amateur cooking soul — that you shouldn’t leave the seeds/ribs to a jalape?o in if you want to better control the heat.

As I read the recipe instruction to “roast the whole jalape?o and toss the entire pepper into the blender,” I thought,

“Umm, I don’t think that’s a good idea” ??

Did I listen to my gut? Did I let my decades of cooking experience override what I?knew?to be a simple recipe error?

No, no I did not. I threw the whole little fireball in the Vitamix and whirled it, alongside the rest of the ingredients, into a salsa hotter than driving your ’89 Ford Taurus through Texas in August with all the windows up, and no AC.

All it took was one quick taste test before my lips swelled and tingled. “I knew it!” I yelled. “Why can’t I just trust my instincts?!”

As my sister would say, it was “blow your hole out” spicy.

Do you ever feel like you know what the right thing to do is but you just don’t trust yourself enough to override what everyone else is saying?

Whether it’s knowing what’s best for your business, health, finances, fitness or love life — it’s hard enough to tune into your gut, let alone act on it.

It’s one thing to make an overly spicy batch of tomatillo salsa, but if you do this over and over in your business it can seriously suffer.

You get inundated with loads of info on a daily basis. You have to judge what feels right, what doesn’t, and move forward. When you get that unmistakable unsure feeling in your gut, remember:

• What’s cool or popular with everyone else might not work for you.
• Just because you see someone online proclaiming to know what they’re talking about, doesn’t actually mean they do. In fact, they might not know any better than you.
• If something doesn’t sound right in your gut, pay attention to what it’s trying to tell you.

But there’s a big difference between trusting your gut or knowing yourself (and your spice preferences) better than someone else, and becoming the guy at the gym handing out squat advice who hasn’t bent his knees past 45 degrees in 10 years.

You don’t know everything about everything. You’re human, none of us do.

But if you can’t trust your gut in your area(s) of expertise, how are we going to build authority, create a community, and grow your business?

I’m no pro, but I’ve been cooking long enough to know some foundational rules, including removing the ribs and seeds from peppers.

I hereby declare that I’m going to work on:

1?? cooking more freely and creatively, without looking at recipes (for things I know I know how to cook)

2?? trusting my gut when I know things are wrong and stop doubting that everyone must know better than me

What about you? What do you need to own more of? We only have a few months left in 2024, so let’s work on this together.

To overly spicy salsa (that I toned down with a little sugar, more lime juice, and refrigeration — because I leaned into my knowledge on how to balance heat) that teaches us the lessons we need to blow our holes out listen to our guts.

xo,

Sam