Some live to eat, I lived to dread cooking.
Cooking can be the biggest chore in someone’s life. Think about it — it’s basically impossible to be rich enough to eat out for all of your meals, and you have to eat three times a day. It’s almost as time consuming as sleep (which I do for eight hours per day) except you can’t really avoid it. People who pull off the equivalent of a sleep “All Nighter” are starving themselves.
Somehow, this became my chore.
I started my cooking career by trying out recipes with my brother, which transitioned to me feeding my workaholic parents who don’t have time to cook. It became a lot — I actually fed anywhere from five to seven people at a time, usually, which meant that the prep, cooking, and clean up took just a bit longer. I was also vegan in a house where the 1941 weekly ration of 2.5 pounds of meat was taken as a daily ration instead (source: my local downtown historical site).
I cooked an offbeat but unvaried series of dishes. We always cooked rice, but I also cooked veg+garlic, which was the staple. There wasn’t much else to enjoy because no one really liked vegetables. About once a week, I took some liberty and cooked either potatoes or a bean curry, or even a bean curry soup. I liked this freedom and cooking a lot, but I didn’t get a lot of support from my family. My meals felt taken for granted — it seemed like my family ate meals without caring where it came from.
I began to think about moms and other parents who cook — where is their appreciation? I told my mom thank you for all of those thankless years, because cooking for more than one palette can be fun, but it can also be tiring.
I had to adjust my meals quickly. There were times when I experimented with a dish of tofu and tomato (a play on the Tomato and Egg dish which is popular in Chinese cuisine) but no one else would eat it — so I ate 5 people’s worth of that before it went bad.
This means I needed to adapt the dishes to their palettes. I didn’t.
I went back to making my veg+garlic and rice, while trying to help push this as a good alternative to eating out. I made the same dish day in and day out. I carried this to my first apartment when I moved out — so cooking was miserable!
My long-distance girlfriend came over four times over several months, and I started to realize how fun cooking with her was. We would look up recipes and plan our grocery trips in advance, enjoying sushi bowl dinners, lasagne, and tacos. We even experimented with Vegiterranean dishes (look it up here) sometimes with recipes we checked out from the library.
She taught me how to take time before our meals to be thankful for the company, the food, God, and activities that we got to enjoy together. With her, I had learned to take in life, and take in a meal that honored the way it was brought to us. For that, I am eternally grateful.
However, I continued back in my old cooking habits whenever she went back home. I felt terrible every time I had to meal prep because it was such a CHORE!
Cook with me
Cook a meal
We are one
Meal appeal
Where did that fun go?
The following week after I realized all of this, I went to the drawing board and planned to make a sushi bowl, something that we had put together, together. I dreaded the incremental effort needed to put this together, but I did it anyway.
I ate this meal, poured my soy sauce, and crunched on carrots and cucumber. I brought it to work, and people asked about it —
“How did you make that?”
“I should really put something fancy like that together someday!”
Besides their comments, I realized that I enjoyed cooking and creating this dish. I even played with my food. I brought a lot of planning and creativity to the table, for a product that I knew would be amazing. Maybe all of that effort was worth it, after all.
