How to turn cooking into a habit (Part 1)
Practice? You talkin’ ‘bout practice?!
You and I are not the Allen Iverson’s of cooking; we need to practice cooking in order for it to become second-nature. The key to learning a new skill and making it sustainable, repeatable, and enjoyable is to do it over and over and over again until you feel confident when you do it. Planning your meals, shopping for groceries, prepping food, cooking it, eating it, and cleaning up afterwards is going to take some time to become the norm. You’ve gotta build a rhythm, make it second nature; if you don’t practice free throws daily then you aren’t going to be able to make them in a game when you’re tired.
I’m hopeful that cooking can become for you what it has become for me. Lots of my friends leave work for the day and immediately head to the gym, where they participate in an ancient ritual of moving heavy things from place to place. I’ve been told by people that are in shape that this activity does wonders for the mind: they’re able to move on from the stresses of the day, and push their stresses out through their pores. That’s what cooking is for me: it’s how I wind down after a long day. I love getting home and going into my kitchen to cook a meal. Prep is my warm-up, pan frying is my cardio, plating is my cool-down.
To continue the workout analogy, there are lots of days where you don’t want to work out and you just want to binge Netflix and house a bag of Doritos on the couch. That’s fine, you should occasionally allow yourself to be a lazy slob. But if you go through with it, the idea becomes much less tempting next time because sitting on the couch all day eating cheese snacks is going to make you feel awful. The point is this: sometimes you won’t feel like cooking and you’ll settle for takeout or a drive-thru, and then you’ll make the same decision tomorrow, and before you know it all the fruits and veggies you bought have shriveled and ‘returned to the dust from whence they came’ and you’ll vow to abandon this silly idea of cooking food yourself.
This is part one of a three-part series in which we’ll explore how you can turn cooking for yourself into a sustainable habit. We’ll start by examining recipes and technique, two of the more confusing parts of the cooking life. In part two, we’ll discuss planning your meals so that you can avoid food waste and frustration. In part three, we’ll talk about expectations you might have of how this journey will go and how you can simplify food in order to increase efficiency and enjoyment.
Let’s dive in.
Pick Better Recipes
If you haven’t cooked in awhile or are just starting out, the key for you is to find straightforward recipes with a small number of ingredients and fast prep times. Here are a few other tips for picking recipes that won’t end up discouraging you from future attempts at weeknight cooking.
- Read each recipe closely. Look for hidden red flags that will slow you down or frustrate you when it’s time to cook. Examples include marinating ahead of time or allowing for food to chill in the fridge before cooking, and the word “julienne”.
- As an advocate of pessimism, I’d go ahead and double the prep time listed on each recipe you find. If you’re a competitive person, feel free to use the stopwatch feature on your phone to time yourself and see how accurate prep times are for various dishes. I know American Test Kitchen does in-depth analysis of prep times, and I’ve found theirs to be in line with what I’m actually capable of doing, but even their prep times are approximations based on average prep times across many skill levels.
- Watch out for special equipment that you’ll need to prep the food properly. Oftentimes I’ve found that special equipment needs are buried in a paragraph of text, which is why it’s important to read each recipe closely before you decide to use it. An example would be a recipe that calls for a ‘few quick pulses in a food processor’ or one that requires you to use your immersion blender (because everyone has one of those, right?). One of my favorite examples is a recipe I almost attempted that casually mentioned placing one of the ingredients in a dehydrator for awhile. A DEHYDRATOR?! Who the heck has a dehydrator on hand? That’s not even on my wish list of items to purchase in the future, and I love buying weird kitchen equipment.
As a general rule I prefer cooking from books to cooking from a random recipe I saw on Pinterest. There are a few reasons for this:
- Cookbooks oftentimes have high quality photos of the food you’re trying to make, which I find more helpful than debilitating, but you may feel differently.
- You can lay a cookbook open to the correct recipe and constantly check it without having to play with your phone.
- Using a cookbook frees up your phone for running timers or playing on Instagram while you burn the sauce.
- Getting comfortable with a cookbook author’s writing style will increase your comfort using their recipes, which in turn increases the likelihood that your dinner will turn out just as you imagined.
- Cookbooks are often organized by type of meat, so you’ll be able to quickly build meals. This works better than Googling “chicken recipes” and sifting through billions of results.
- Someone probably tested each recipe in the cookbook and decided they were worthy of inclusion in the publication. There is no such vetting process for “slow cooker General Tso’s chicken that tastes just like the real thing!” - that is a multi-level and terrible cooking joke, plz disregard
A last note on cookbooks: Cookbooks often contain culinary terms that you haven’t heard before, which is intimidating, and probably part of what makes Pinterest and the cooking blogosphere more appetizing than trudging through pages of The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook. But the upside is that more new words equals more new learning, and learning is fun!
Stop, Collaborate, Listen
When you’re reading recipes, you’ll come across words associated with prep or a cooking technique that are unfamiliar. When that happens, take time to look up the word before you continue.
Try searching YouTube for an example of someone cooking what you’re cooking. This will give you an idea of how long it would actually take to use that method or to prepare certain ingredients, and if the equipment you have will get the job done. Videos are also a fast way to learn shortcuts and even hear sounds associated with different cooking techniques.
To expand on the sounds aspect of cooking: sound is more useful to me now that I’ve spent so much time in my kitchen. I can tell when water is boiling by the bubbling or, depending on the size of the pot, the sing-song pops and whistles that happen as small bubbles start to bump into each other. I can tell when chicken is done on one side because the hiss of escaping air and cooking juices dies down considerably right around the time I need to flip it over. Pay attention and I bet you’ll start to notice how helpful sounds can be.
The number one gripe I hear about meal delivery services like Hello Fresh or Blue Apron is that the recipes require significant time be spent slicing and dicing. This is something you have do have some control over, in terms of getting faster at slicing and dicing. If you find yourself thinking, ‘Surely there’s a better way to do this’, then you’re probably right and you should look for a better way. Again, YouTube is great for this, and there are several other blogs that produce short videos on common prep techniques. A favorite of mine is watching people try to prepare fruits and veggies on Epicurious’ YT channel. Here’s a video of people trying to figure out pineapples, which is both funny and scary (because of the way these folks are holding the knives):
Think of video content as your private instructor that is always on call when you aren’t sure about the difference between broil and braise.
Learning new techniques for prep and cooking will keep you interested and challenge you to keep practicing this new skill until it becomes enjoyable. Learning can be a slow process, but as Michael Pollan says:
The missing ingredient from our recipes is time. –Michael Pollan, Cooked
Factor time into your cooking practice, and you’ll have no trouble forming a sustainable habit of cooking for yourself.
Stay tuned for part two on meal planning.
