It's time to learn to cook

I need to learn to cook. But I don’t think I mean that in the same way that other people mean it.

Sometimes people say “I need to learn to cook” and mean something about creating recipes, or creating dishes straight out of their own minds. Or sometimes they say that as a way of saying “I need to learn to cook on a tight budget”, or make food out of their existing pantry goods, or food that meets their dietary needs, or other things like that.

Those aren’t my problems. I can eat just about anything. I’m able to buy what ingredients I need without problems. I have no interest in the creative portion of cooking: I don’t want to make up new recipes, I’m happy following the recipes other people have made.

When I say I need to learn to cook, what I mean is that I need to learn to integrate cooking into my life. I need to learn how to make the time to cook. I need to build up the set of skills you need to make cooking take less time. I need to learn how to plan ahead, so I can buy groceries on a weekend, and use them sometime before they turn into a goopy mush at the bottom of my vegetable drawer… again. I need to learn how to make cooking something that I don’t look at with dread, as I think about how it will take me 12 minutes just to find the potato peeler, because I last used it for Thanksgiving last year.

For the past two years, our household has survived almost entirely on take out food. We were never great at regular home cooking – one of my kids basically told me that she has been ruined on pasta forever after being raised for years on undercooked Trader Joe’s tortellini and jarred sauce, because I just was never up to doing anything more complex and I never knew I was undercooking these things every day – but in the past few years now that we’ve just been down to three of us in the house, there’s been even less motivation to try to cook meals. I’m pretty sure that delivery drivers from every one of our local food places recognize our house on sight at this point.

But it’s time to stop depending entirely on delivery food. Really, we should never have fallen into that pattern, but I want to eat healthier, better, and most importantly, more varied food than the same 6 takeout joints that we iterate through every couple weeks.

I need to learn how to integrate cooking into my daily life. To learn the skills to make it easy: to learn how to shop, how to prep ingredients, and make the process easier and more straightforward. I need to practice these things over and over again until they become second nature, like I know they are for so many, including the household I grew up in.

I need to learn to cook. And I hope that you’ll follow along with me as I learn.