April 18th, 2019

Eat the ingredients

I’m a fair-to-middling cook but I enjoy my own cooking and I’m pretty knowledgeable about food and nutrition. My husband can also cook ok, and between us we cook usually 5 out of 7 dinners each week, along with almost all our breakfasts. We both aim to pack a lunch 4 out of 5 days at work and usually succeed. I know, we’re gooddamn heroes, right?

The trick to cooking most of your own food and it being fairly nutritious and tasty and also not a giant hassle/time-vacuum is keeping your standards fairly low. I keep getting sucked into various “meal-planning in minutes” type magazine articles and programs. The most recent time, I was *shocked* at how complicated it all was. People want to eat 4 or 5 different foods at every meal? With a sauce? No wonder so many people feel like they “can’t cook” if that is what they think cooking is. The ingredients travel so far from what they started out as to become the actual meal–for a weeknight supper, I would have usually stopped after a step or two, or just eaten the raw ingredients.

Even “super-simple” recipes I come across these days aren’t that simple. I keep seeing salad dressing recipes that have 10+ ingredients and require a blender. I’ve eaten those–they’re good!–but unless someone falls at my feet asking for it, salad dressing at my house is going to be balsamic vinegar shook directly out of a bottle, or else one of those Kraft prepared ones. Yes, with all the sodium.

I can cook fancy things and they usually turn out nicely (thought not always), though I wind up resentful as I wash all those endless dishes. But really, most of the time, I just like most foods, and I’m happy to have them be a little boring if the tradeoff is that they are easy and I don’t have to wash a blender. Here are some examples of things I like to eat:

• roast chicken made by washing a chicken and putting it in the oven with some salt and pepper on it
• microwaved sweet potato
• frozen vegetables and fruits
• bagged salads
• baked fish made by putting some fish in the oven with salt, pepper, and lemon
• lentil soup made by cooking red lentils (the kind you don’t have to soak–other kinds of lentils are too much work) in broth I made from a package with some chopped onion and a can of coconut milk
• poached eggs in the microwave, scrambled eggs, all forms of eggs
• canned tuna
• chopped vegetables sauteed with a jarred sauce (hoisin, marinara, curry paste/coconut milk) plus some sort of protein
• smoked tofu, because you don’t have to cook or marinate it for it to taste ok, unlike stupid regular tofu, which is too much work
• cheese cut and eaten directly out of the package

I am very big on looking at a recipe and calculating how many dishes I’m going to have to wash if I make it. I’d say that that consideration is right up there with how the meal will taste! I fear this post makes me sound really lazy and…yeah? But as I say, I also cook most of my own meals (or Mark does) and like them well enough, which is something many people say they are striving for, so I thought I’d offer the humble suggestion: try just being really lazy! Cook yourself the easiest possible thing! See if you like it.

I’m going to go have lunch now, which will be: carrot sticks, hummus, an apple, yoghurt. All foods I like, almost zero effort.

I feel like laziness is a totally under-considered option. You really don’t always have to go the extra mile.