Cooking as a practice

‘Don't worry about being perfect. Worry about being curious.’

Samin Nosrat

Cooking isn’t complicated. As long as you have some competence using kitchen tools and understand the basics of how ingredients work with each other, you can make limitless variations on a theme and have them all come out well. Home cooking, especially, is a forgiving process where skills and taste will only get better with time. Anyone can be a good home cook.

But it’s also not easy to do every day for most of your life. Prepping and cleaning up, deciding what to make everyday, and always racing to have something on the plate come meal time. There is a relentlessness about it. If you don’t switch up the game once in a while, it can also be mind numbing and monotonous. It isn’t sustainable, for me at least, if it isn’t fun.

One of the mind tricks I employ to get around the inevitable plateau of misery where there is much falling off the wagon, is reframing the question. Instead of asking, ‘how can I cook enough everyday?’ I find it more useful to ask ‘how do I keep myself fed this week?’ The first approach puts far too much pressure on cooking as an indispensable daily activity, needing impressive levels of discipline. The second, on the other hand, shifts focus to what I would like to eat which is a much nicer thing to think about, plan and work on.

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That leads to ‘what should I be eating anyway?’ One cannot subsist on a diet of cake and coffee, just because it’s fun. I began reading books and watching documentaries to learn what scientists and nutritionists had to say about cooking, and started connecting the dots between food and movement and energy and hormones. Checking nutrition labels became automatic. When confronted with new or unfamiliar ingredients, my first instinct is to take a good photo, then look up nutrient density and ways to increase bioavailability. There is only so much food I can eat in a day and during busy times it’s the same four meals on repeat, so I try to make it count. Eventually, this turned into my new normal.

Once you’re armed with the fundamentals of food and have arrived at meals that are nutritionally dense as well as enjoyable, the next question presents itself, ‘How do I keep making the dishes I like, week after week after week?’ I prefer oven roasting to sweating over a stove. There is less standing about keeping an eye on things, even if it takes longer. Maybe steaming is that hands-free cooking method for you. Or using an instant pot or a pressure cooker. Any way to multitask without unnecessary chaos and stress is a win.

Cleaning as you go is underrated. You will feel far less deflated and defeated if you’re washing a cup here or putting away a bowl into the dishwasher there, than if you were staring at a sink full of dirty dishes at the end of a tiring day. Meal prep is a great way to cook once, eat many times. It also helps you portion control and be more intentional about a schedule because you know exactly when your food is going to run out.

At the end of the day, cooking has to be an internally rewarding activity. If you like interacting with ingredients, if your intellect feels enlarged and engaged, and if you feel well-equipped and capable in your own kitchen, cooking is much more likely to become a practice and not just something you do when you feel like it.