Not all recipes are born equal. Simpler is better. Simpler is easier. Simpler is necessary because my apartment is barely 600 square feet and I didn't buy it for the kitchen. With the microwave on the countertop I barely have room to chop my veggies.
"Combine ingredients in stand mixer-" NOPE.
"On low setting in your food processor-" NOPE.
"Add 1/2 bunch of fresh parsley leaves-" Like I have bunches of fresh parsley leaves just hanging around waiting to be used!
When you're living on your own, ensuring your fresh food does not go bad before you've consumed it all is a herculean task. Standard portions are just not made for single people.
My fridge is empty save for some eggs and orange juice, but my pantry and freezer are always fully stocked. So help a sister out and gimme recipes with more staples and convenience. None of this "1/3 of a cabbage" bullshit.
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It sounds funny to say it, but it's only recently that I've developed an appreciation for food. Let me explain.
At some point in my mid-twenties I decided I wanted to be even healthier than I already was. The news was all a-buzz with the foods that were slowly killing us all. I cut out all kinds of things from my diet: fast food, pop, chips, and canned/frozen food. No more running to Burger King or grabbing a can of Chunky Soup for lunch. I was going to cook fresh, healthy food like they showed on the Food Network. I was going to eat Real Food(TM), which technically included stuff like cake and pie and vodka smoothies, so I didn't even feel deprived!
Bless my young foolish heart, for I knew not what I had wrought.
By cutting those things out of my diet, I didn't actually switch to consuming healthy food because here's the kicker: I hate cooking and I hate being stuck in the kitchen. When a delicious meal didn't miraculously materialize in my kitchen after I came home from work, I just... didn't eat. I'd maybe munch on some carrots but to make a MEAL? Hnnngggg no. Too much effort. What was the point? I wouldn't like what I made anyway. Everything I cooked was (and mostly still is) a disappointment to my taste buds.
But fast forward a couple years of this lifestyle and I began to notice I had lost a bit of weight. This was NOT a good thing, as I naturally skewed to the low end of the BMI scale to begin with. For my own sanity and self-preservation, I decided not to beat myself up for choosing convenience over healthy.
I don't know what happened to my brain over those two years of culinary austerity but my first time back to McNuggets and New York Fries poutine felt like... a revelation. For the first time in my life, food really and truly was setting off the pleasure centre of my brain. It had been rewired after such a long hiatus from glorious fat and sugar.
I still don't eat fast food or pop very much, but now I let myself if I have to and don't beat myself up over it. Who am I to argue with my brilliant brain telling me maybe, just maybe, I deserve food that makes me happy.
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At this very moment, there's a platter of cupcakes hanging out on my counter. I ran out of containers to store them all in; like I said before, my kitchen is not strong on size or storage.
While my friends master the art of meal making through beef bourguignon and scratch-made vegan burgers, I have settled comfortably in the realm of Cupcake Realness. It's my go-to culinary tactic that burnishes me with the illusion of domestic godliness. I make them from scratch too, and it's an unholy pain in the ass, but it's the only area of food where my curiousity and creativity are piqued. I still want to try making a filled cupcake, either through piping or baking a little Lindor ball in the centre of the cupcake. I want make more cupcakes using pop for the wet ingredients (seriously, it's a thing... a sugary and delicious thing). I want to practice my icing techniques, which are passable at best.
The thing with cupcakes is that I'm never making them for all for myself, I couldn't eat them all if I tried. I got into cupcakes through a cupcake baking competition at work on St. Patrick's Day. I baked cupcakes for coworkers, for family, for my dude. I sometimes bake cakes to share with them as well.
When it's meant to be shared, when the food is an expression of my caring and competence, I'm all about creativity and effort. Interesting, that I don't do the same for my daily personal meals.
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When I was a kid, meal time was fraught. My parents served me too much food and I didn't have the capacity to eat it all. So I sat at the dinner table looking everywhere but my bowl. Beyond a few bites, food held no interest to me.
It's funny how little you appreciate your mother's cooking until you leave home.
(As an aside, if I ever have a child who's anything like me I've already formulated a tactic to manage such behaviour. I let my child eat however much they want, they get to control their portion size. But then NO SNACKING an hour later when they're hungry, they can just suck it up. It'll help them learn their capacity for eating! Except I don't think I'll actually have the heart to stick it to my kid like that.)
But between meals I would tell my family how much I disliked meal time. I told them I longed for that day in the distant future when we could be able to get all our mealtime nutrition in pill form. No hassle, no drama, just pop a pill and get on with your day.
Part of me feels cheated that such a pill never materialized. Another part of me recognizes that a pill could never do what a real meal does, unless bloating up the stomach was part of its functions.
As a kid, food was nutritive, mechanical, necessary. I ate because I was hungry. I didn't eat because I wasn't hungry. Nowadays I clarify with my friends: "I'm hungry... not stomach-hungry, mouth-hungry." I salivate for something particular, something to satisfy and delight my palate. Kid Smitha did not delight in anything food related.
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If it were just an issue of cooking being a bore, I could find healthy shortcuts and solve my food hang-ups. But it's not just an issue of food. It's hunger too.
By the time I moved out on my own, it was clear that hunger was the enemy. Hunger was a hurdle to be overcome. Hunger was a needy toddler begging for my attention. If I just ignored it long enough, it would go away and I could continue doing the things I REALLY wanted to do, like study or code or read that amazing book.
Thankfully, just before I turned 30 I finally had enough. I was tired of torturing myself with hunger. I vowed to seed my life with so much food opportunity that I wouldn't ever have to be hungry again. It was okay to keep cookies in my drawer at work. It was okay to grocery shop for munchables and not just staples. I deserved food.
Now, if only I could overcome my stinginess about spending money on food.
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With my imminent wedding looming, food and cooking is becoming a more timely topic. It doesn't escape me that in my particular case, I'm going to have a lot more responsibilities regarding food preparation than my fiancé. But I barely ever cook for anyone other than myself, how in the world is my meat-ambivalent self supposed to cook for my fairly carnivorous partner?
Then my mind rolls further down the line and thinks about kids, how feeding children is construed as a primarily female role. I fret and leap to the irrational conclusion: bad cook, bad wife, bad mother. How am I supposed to raise kids who are open and adventurous about their food when I can't prepare such things for them? I grew up with the blessing of a mostly vegetarian mother and a totally omnivorous father, who led me to such loves like brussel sprouts and beetroot.
I can't cook so many of the things that are beloved to me, an endeavour all that trickier because the food I (and my fiancé) love are rooted in ethnicity and culture. Meanwhile all I have in my recipe repertoire is mac & cheese casserole. How are my kids supposed to love Indian/Pakistani food when I don't have the patience or skill to cook that stuff for myself?
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Sometimes I wonder if this is just some serious liberal guilt surfacing. I once read somewhere that liberals are puritanical about food the way conservatives are puritanical about sex. Do food right or there will be drastic consequences. Do organic and local and fair trade and home cooked and low fat and low sodium and bathed in the light of the autumn harvest moon while we're at it.
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