"Can't Cook, Won't Cook"

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After four months of living alone, I have learned that I cannot be without Greek yoghurt, kale, cannellini beans, peanut butter, sour cream, chilli flakes, spinach and frozen chapati breads. Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 2 September 1996". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020. More important is maintaining a rhythm. Where I used to cook once and eat it night after night, I now freeze the other portions or add an element I’ve made from scratch, so as not to break my cooking streak. Seeing my staples, when I look in the fridge or cupboard, means I feel more capable and inspired – and I would not have known what they were had I not been forced to find out. I had accepted my limitations in the kitchen – then, last year, something changed. Now, after just a few mental shifts, I would go so far as to say that I am pretty good at cooking. No one is more surprised than me, except maybe friends who I have cooked for. For most people, the below will be obvious. For the raccoons: read on. Investigate your resistance

Relying on leftovers is often a practical necessity if you’re cooking for yourself, but if you didn’t quite pull off the recipe, leftovers taste of failure – and if you did, you may not want to repeat it once you’ve eaten it three nights in a row. Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 20 November 1995". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020. See if you can identify the source of your belief that you are someone who can’t cook. You might uncover a false assumption – for example, that you don’t deserve to enjoy food, that any time not spent working is wasted, or that cooking is anti-intellectual or even women’s work. Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 2 February 1996". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020.On the odd occasion that my flatmate and I threw dinner parties, the stress of preparation, timing and the implicit expectation to impress prevented me from fully enjoying the evening. And that was with my flatmate doing nearly all the cooking. Since my kitchen awakening, however, I have had friends for dinner once or twice a week. I rarely make anything fancy – just a bowl of stew or pasta, or daal eaten on our laps on the sofa; delicious and nourishing – but this is something I would not have thought I’d ever be comfortable doing.

In short, I scavenged like a raccoon. I wrote cooking off as “not my thing” alongside, say, basketball. And I am not alone. Either way, it is important to find a source that resonates with you. Cooks who wrote lyrically of textures and smells, or who saw every meal as a social celebration, actually reaffirmed my view that I wasn’t refined or gregarious enough to enjoy cooking. Self-help guru and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss surveyed more than 100,000 of his (mostly male) Facebook fans to discover what turned them off cooking and found an array of reasons: too many ingredients or tools, intimidating skills, different dishes finishing at different times, standing at the stove, food waste. Not every recipe is reliable. Cookbooks have at least gone through a process of recipe-testing and copy-editing; a top Google search result can just reflect good SEO. “Frankly, there are a lot of bad recipes out there,” Johansen says.It is through this freestyling that you start to develop your own instincts, says Guardian writer Felicity Cloake. “My advice is to concentrate on a handful of dishes you know you like until you can make them well, and gradually adapt them to make them your own.”