Why cook?

That’s the real question, isn’t it?  Why?  I’ve asked myself that one time and time again.  Unfortunately, the answer has usually been, “Don’t wanna.”  I mean, there are legions upon legions of locations that will do all the hard work for you.  You know, all the chopping, all the washing, all the measuring, all the actual stirring and sautéing and baking and grilling.  And all of them can do a better job than I can.  McDonald’s does a better job.

Except that I’m not a young string bean anymore.  I can’t eat the kind of sludge I ate at twenty and not expect to show extremely adverse results.  Then there’s the marriage thing, and the inevitable discussions and debates and utter lack of decision-making that someone else equally wishy-washy brings into the whole food-obtaining process.  In short, eating after you’ve paired up is a lot more complicated than when you’re single and eating a bowl of cereal for a late-night dinner-snack-whatever-meal-thingie.

So, yeah, after nine years of marriage, the time has finally come to actually try to wrestle a little sanity back into eating and food procurement.  My innards, honestly, can’t take much more.

Problems, oh the pain of problems!

• I hate eating the same thing over and over.  Recipes are huge and cumbersome affairs that result in the hell of leftovers.
• Finding a decent recipe is nigh unto impossible.  Cooking and chopping and mixing and stirring for three hours just to end up with tasteless slop is unbearable agony.
• Husband can only cook three things: chili (terrible), spaghetti (boring!), and Kraft Mac N Cheez.  He doesn’t mind eating the three things forever for the rest of his existence.  Note inherent conflict with my problem #1.
• I utterly suck at cooking.  I utterly suck at shopping.  I hate doing the same thing every day over and over.
• I manage to injure myself doing the easiest and stupidest of things.
• Making shopping lists and actually getting the right items at the store is surprisingly challenging for a space cadet like me.
• I hate cleaning up and doing dishes.

I can just hear the voices tut-tutting me for being so petty and useless.  You’re right.  I am.  The most simple and routine of activities for most humans, the most trivial of things that many take up as an actual hobby has proved near impossible to me for most of my childhood and adult existence.

Research, the root of all solutions!

So, I started digging.  My husband had seen several threads on Reddit about low-cost, low-prep and simple cooking.  I started reading and digging and all of a sudden the detail centers of my brain overloaded.  My eyes bled as I read yet another recipe and tried to envision the interplay of yet another ten ingredients.  Really, I can do a pretty good job of predicting taste from a list of ingredients, but I can only do it for a few minutes before my brain goes into shutdown mode.

Still, after three or four nights of brain overload, I came to a few realizations:

• I can put up with cooking if the dish take less than an hour to prepare.
• And the dish tastes decent.
• And there aren’t too many leftovers.
• And I can handle the process four or so times a week, which meshes reasonably well with my writing group schedule.
• And said dishes are sort of almost healthy.

So I read.  And I read some more.  All I had to do was to find a decent cookbook with simple recipes and not too many ingredients in each.  I’d be willing to put up with a failed recipe or two so long as the cooking time didn’t require a billion hours.  I scoured Amazon for “no item” and “microwave” cookbooks.

May I divert for a minute and ask the cooking pros out there why there aren’t more recipes focused on the most useful of all cooking devices?  The microwave has to be one of the best inventions ever in human history, up there with refrigeration, indoor plumbing and soap.  But every single cookbook out there focuses on the vastly more inefficient and annoying stove/oven.  I mean, to boil a kettle of water for a cup of tea takes five or six minutes while the microwave can warm up a nice cup in a minute, and if you stuff the teabag in before you nuke, the tea comes out just perfect after the beep.

Still, the nuker cookbooks were a bust, full of disgusting canned ingredients and just general uckiness.  The Amazon reviews said as much.  If cooking in the microwave was going to end up as preservative-laden and nasty as Applebee’s, why bother cooking at all?

And then I came across the Cooking Light series of books.  Maybe it was a Reddit post, or a random browsing of Amazon that led me to the original book: Cooking Light: 5 Ingredient 15 Minute Cookbook.  I mean, five ingredients?  Fifteen minutes?  I could do that!  I hurried to Barnes & Noble for more exhausting mental ingredient-synthesizing.  Except this book was full of nothing but heavy-duty meat dishes.  And lots of cilantro.  Oodles of cilantro.

My brain near exploded when I came across my near savior: Cooking Light: Fresh Food Fast. Unlike the first, this one had salads and sandwiches and noodles and variety! And most of the recipes included some kind of side dish for an actual meal.  Also, it suggested things like using pre-sliced veggies, and for those that weren’t, simple vertical cuts.  No julienne, no cubing.  In general, these recipes don’t require exotic equipment, so that was also a huge plus.

Devising A System

What’s any project without a pointless system to “streamline” and simplify the process?  In my case, I needed to find a way to somehow pre-plan, pre-anticipate indecision and get early buy-in from my husband on any week’s choices of food.  The system’s still in its early working stages, but it seems to “work” in a loose sense.

1. Both parties scour recipes for things we can eat and mark relevant recipes as “edible.”  This was the hard part.  My husband and I don’t have many overlapping dislikes.  He hates olives.  I love them.  I despise cilantro.  He can’t taste it.  He likes eggs and cheese.  I don’t particularly like either.  Still, we ended up with about 100 mutually acceptable recipes, which has pretty much ended the “what do we eat?” debate.
   
2. Each week, I pick two recipes and he picks two from the acceptable pool.  Since we’ve pre-consented to the recipes, neither of us is particularly unhappy with the other party’s choice.  This stops the whole “cook decides” potential series of arguments, since both parties have an equal voice in the meal choosing process.  And it cuts down on the number of decisions either of us has to make, since it’s only two each, instead of four.
3. I make the grocery list and shop for the ingredients.  I have to say, this is the part I hate the most.  I’m terrible at following lists.  I suck at finding ingredients in any store.  And last week, I didn’t have the faintest clue what a raw shallot looked like.  Sure, I’ve eaten them cooked, but I’d pictured them as being more like a green onion than a half-garlic half-yellow onion mutation. Anyway, you might ask, “Why doesn’t your husband shop with you?”  This one’s simple: there’s a nice organic market near my Thursday night writing group’s meeting spot, so I just do the shopping before the meeting.  What really sucks most about the experience is having impatient yuppies glaring at you as you try to figure out the difference between a cutlet and a butterfly-cut chicken breast.
4. Based on my mood, I pick one of the four things and cook it.  Yeah, there went the whole pretense of “democracy” in the process, right?  Well, whatever.  I’ve noticed my bias goes toward making my two choices first.  My husband picks the heartier, more complicated recipes.  I choose the salads and easy-peasy sandwiches.  I’m lazy.  You do the math.
5. My husband cleans up the balance when the dishwasher gets too jammed for my lack of spatial ability.  Since that’s pretty much every day, and he can cram in three times as many dishes, this one’s a natural.

The hard stuff.

A couple of my friends are cooking gurus.  The biggest piece of advice I got was, “Get good knives.”  My husband claims the Faberware knife set I got in my single days is good.  I’m not actually sure.  It came in a handy-dandy tiny caddy that fit well in my old studio eleven years ago with some measuring spoons and cups.   The whole shebang was $20.00 at Ross or Marshalls or something.  I honestly don’t know if they’re “good” or not.  Still, they cut things.  And sometimes those things have been my fingers.  They seem to be sharp, and penetrate my finger-pads easily, so I’m guessing that means they’re good.  So that wasn’t the real hard part.

“Where’s the cutting board?” I asked my poor coughing husband on my first attempt.  We’re both still sick as dogs from the unholy flu-cold hybrid that’s floating around.

“Don’t we have one of those pull-out built-in things?”

No, our apartment is defective.

“Then it’s hiding in with the pans.”

Nope.  It was in with the unused rice cooker in the cupboard that’s almost permanently stuck shut by the melted felt sticker.

Set the grated cucumber aside in a separate dish.  Wait, I need more than one pan?  And I have to chop up meat-like ingredients, but I can’t use the same cutting board I’m using for the green onions, the mint and the peanuts.  What do I do?

Mix the bean sprouts with the mint and the peanuts.  I need bean sprouts?  Wait, I got everything on the list!  Except the bean sprouts.  Because I forgot to write them down in the three-page-long mutation that claimed to be a list.  Not that I would have been able to find them with all the yuppie-glaring as I blocked their entitled access to the cilantro as I tried to manipulate pen (for crossing off items), plastic bag, list, and grocery cart all in one hand.

Still, improvisation has always been one of my strengths, and I learned a few things quickly.

1. A frying pan makes a good meat-handling and mixing board.  And it washes easily.  No cross-contamination fear!
2. If you only have a couple of measuring cups worth of ingredients, you can store them easily in said cups.
3. A hand-blender works well in lieu of an actual blender if you don’t mind spending six times as long “blending” and you’re stuck in the middle of a recipe.
4. Never ever ever underestimate just how awesome a George Foreman grill can be, especially if you don’t have a real grill.
5. You can actually make an unusual and tasty hummus from thawed frozen peas, two cloves of garlic, a bunch of mint, and a little water and olive oil.  Oooo!  And it was good with crackers too.
6. Recipe quantities of an ingredient never actually match what comes in a can.  What the heck do I do with the other two ounces of pimentos?

Ongoing modifications.

Problem:  Writing the grocery list sucks and takes forever.  Low-tech solution: Use Notepad.  Contend with annoying Windows 8 printer networking laziness.  Misspell “cabbage” because you’re in a rush.  Time savings: 15 minutes.  Need to improve:  Actually categorizing ingredients with general store layout and location.  Annoying because this can take forever and I hate organizing things.

Problem:  Where is everything at the store?  Low-tech solution: Mentally catalog store layout and odd, illogical locations of ingredients.  Time savings: None.  You’re still bumbling around like an idiot until the third or fourth comprehensive visit.

Problem:  Not enough dishes and measuring things.  No chopping or blending devices.  Solution:  Buying more.  Further problem:  Research and expense and general additional shopping annoyance.  In progress.

Real lessons learned.

I’d originally intended this cooking thing as a quick experiment.  I wasn’t sure I could take cooking as often as I’d hoped, and I can’t say that I’ve actually cooked four days out of a week.  But I have cooked on four evenings before the ingredients I’d purchased went bad, and the process wasn’t that onerous beyond the actual hell of shopping.  We haven’t saved that much money over eating out, but the overall quality of the recipes and ingredients required in Cooking Light: Fresh Food Fast has been quite good.  Most of the expense has been toward building some kind of library of spices, so in the long run, costs will go down.

And I do mean the recipes are good.  Each of the four recipes I made has required relatively little oil, the ingredients are generally clean, and even though the quantities appear to be small compared to a typical restaurant portion, the meals are reasonably nutritionally balanced and filling.  And there’s none of that obnoxious no-carbiness, so woo-hoo!  Plus, for as few “ingredients” as the recipes claim to require, they actually taste like food!

I’ve also learned that “five ingredients, fifteen minutes” is a total exaggeration.  The average recipe requires about ten, and takes, with my utter lack of experience, about forty-five minutes to prepare.  There are leftovers, but not horrific weeks’ worth as in your typical recipe.  Instead, there’s a decent lunch left over the next day.  Eating something twice isn’t as awful as eating it for weeks at a time.  I’m guessing actual prep time will decrease as I get better at slicing things.

The best part, though?

Neither of us is dead from food poisoning!

Yet.