Four adventurers, chasing simplicity (who knew?).
I went all the way to the Azores to learn something I already knew.
(If you’ve never heard of the Azores, add them to your list. They’re a scattering of volcanic islands plonked in the middle of the Atlantic, roughly halfway between Portugal and Canada. I’d never heard of them either until we booked the trip.)
It was ten days with Marcella and a couple of friends, three islands and a proper break from the everyday.
It was an extraordinary experience … but the highlight was the food (to my surprise).
It wasn’t a Michelin-star experience or a white tablecloth dinner with more forks than you actually need.
It wasn’t even fancy enough to snap a photo of.
We ate cheaply, and we ate brilliantly, and almost every meal had the same entrée … fish.
(Now, if you’re a long-time reader, you might be saying, “Michael, aren’t you a vegetarian?” I am 90% of the time, but when you get to experience fresh fish, I lean more pescatarian.)
It was a whole fish cooked over wood. With rock salt and olive oil … and that’s it.
You got the heat of the salt, the smoke off the wood, the clean taste of the fish itself, and a squeeze of lemon at the end for a little brightness and punch.
It was simple and extraordinary.
And it made me realize how badly we overcomplicate things.
We overdress them. We overwork them. We overworry them. (Three verbs, one bad habit, and I’m still talking about fish.)
It reminded me of a cooking show I saw years ago. The chefs were each handed a gorgeous piece of salmon, and off they went searing, foaming, plating, and performing. Some pulled it off, but most didn’t.
One judge said the bravest thing they could have done, that might have won them the whole thing, was to slice the salmon raw and serve it as sashimi.
The fish is that good. Get out of its way.
The hard move is almost never to add more.
It’s to find the nerve to do the one simple thing that makes the whole thing better.
When the work is good, our instinct is to prove we can do more. This might be to please more people, or maybe it’s to make ourselves feel clever.
But the creative act (aka the courageous one) is the opposite.
Make the thing shine, not you. Easy to say over a plate of grilled fish. Harder on a Tuesday with a deadline. But the move’s the same.
