After more than a month of thinking about it and nearly three weeks of sitting on the (frozen) supplies, I finally took the time today (a week before this gets posted) to make a little recipe one of my friends prepared for us when I was visiting over Thanksgiving. It’s a relatively simple chicken dish that is basically a simple stir-fry, but it’s a recipe without a card or instructions beyond what he told me since it is entirely of his own devising. You see, over the recent years, he has taken to cooking not like I do (starting with a recipe card and making alterations based on smell or taste until the recipe becomes my own enough that I don’t need a recipe card or instructions any more), but by learning from professionals on YouTube. There’s a lot of great channels out there that cover quite a variety of things, but the best ones aren’t how to prepare a recipe and the background of the recipe, but how the various components of recipes work. Fats/oils, aromatics, various techniques: that sort of stuff. He’s had to rely on them since he lost most of his sense of smell when he caught Covid a while back, but knowing the basics, how things eventually taste, and why it all works the way it does is clearly the superior method to winging it by nose as I do. It allows him to put things together in new ways without needing a starting point like I do and it seems to be working out really well for him and his wife. And, now that I’ve recreated one of his recipes at home, me too.

I used to really love to cook. When I was little, I always wanted to be involved whenever my mother was baking something, preparing a meal, or just working in the kitchen, enough so that my aunt (who has been a chef, caterer, restaurateur, baker, and more) always got me some kind of cooking-related gifts almost as far back as I can remember. Even my parents and other family members wound up getting in it too, eventually. Wooden spoons, a chef’s hat and apron, pots and pans, a set of spatulas, and even a knife set when I got older. I was the only freshman moving into my dorm in college with well-used cookware and it was because I’d been cooking for about a decade at that point. First to help out my mother or make things myself and then as a part of the variety of household labor I did while being homeschooled. That was what probably did me in, really. Turning cooking from something I enjoyed and could do to take care of people into something that was an obligation, that eventually started to go unnoticed, and even resulted in some weird resentment from my mother when, after I left for college and no longer contributed to household cooking, my siblings would ask for me to make specific things when I was visiting the place I grew up. It’s one of those moments that really sticks with me because of how unexpected it was and how vehement and bitter my mother sounded when my siblings asked me to prepare the chosen meal that night since my version of it tasted better than our mother’s. Moments like that, plus the lack of access to a place to cook and then not enough money to make much of anything once I had an apartment kind of beat the love of cooking out of me.

The remainder vanished when I started to live alone after the pandemic. Prior to that, I’d still make food fairly regularly, often cook for my roommates, and invite people over for meals just to have an excuse to make more involved, lavish meals. But when I moved into my own apartment and stopped having people over due to Covid, I also stopped cooking as much. Partly it was to save money during a time when I was adjusting to a new financial reality (higher rent, no overtime, the beginnings of the rapid increase in costs, etc.) and partly it was because I just didn’t care that much anymore. That has lasted until fairly recently (and is still at least kind of true today), and I’ve been just as happy to eat a frozen pizza as I am to eat one I made myself, so why bother going through all the extra effort? In the last few months, though, maybe a year now, I’ve been wanting to rekindle my love for cooking. Not just because it’s easier to eat more healthy when cooking for yourself, but also to give myself back something I used to enjoy before time and circumstance beat it out of me. So I’ve followed the YouTube channels, I’ve start looking at recipes online (which grow less and less trustworthy with each passing day), and, for the first time in what feels like a very long time but is probably just a couple months, I made myself a meal that wasn’t frozen, mostly from a box, some kind of breakfast, or incredibly elaborate (I still do those kinds of multi-hour preparation meals a few times a month, not quite weekly). It was delicious, all my effort has paid off, and now it will be easier to do next time.

The goal is to get back into the habit of buying a larger variety of food and stocking things that can be used in a variety of recipes so I don’t have to plan out every single meal (which often leads to takeout because my soul will yearn for deviation from the plan and takeout is the only option if you’ve bought exactly what you need to make a bunch of specifically chosen recipes), all so I can cook more often than not. Which might mean making some additional changes to my day-to-day schedule so I’ve actually got time to cook, but given how little stuff I’ve got in the evenings after work, now, it should be alright if I need a little more time between getting home from work and hopping online to play video games. It would be nice to cook again, even if that means doing the dishes every night. I miss the fun of it, the experimentation, the gratification of a job well done, the way it would make my apartment smell… There’s so much good that comes from cooking and, as part of trying to balance my life out a bit more this year, I hope I have the time and energy to do it more than last year.