I really love food, and I love cooking.
I love variety… in theory. In practice, I end up making the same things over and over and iterating on them. Does anyone else do this? It’s almost like a game development cycle: I build a prototype, test it, make tweaks, build again. Or try the same structure with a new combination of flavors. Variations on a theme.
(Unfortunately it’s also how I write if left to my own devices which is why writing takes a really long time, as I’m always tweaking and editing as I go.)
Luckily my household partner seems to have a high tolerance for repetition.
Nearly every morning begins with a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal, often simmered the night before, and eaten cold in the summer months with frozen blueberries and a handful of almonds and sometimes, a drip of maple syrup. It’s become such a habit that I can hardly imagine starting a day without it. When I’m traveling, I find myself craving it.
Another thing I’m iterating on is a very simple recipe with whole wheat pasta shells, chopped broccoli, and toasted walnuts, dusted with Parmesan. Sometimes the simplest recipes take the most tweaking, as every element needs to be just right. I mean, in a sense you can’t lose with this combo, but I have an idea of what I want it to be like in my mind and each iteration brings me slightly closer to it: the ratio of broccoli to pasta was the first thing that needed to be solved, as well as the size of the chop. Too big and you don’t get good miscegenation. Too small and the broccoli loses its bite and crunch. Then how much olive oil? Steam the broccoli first before sauté or not? (I tried steaming the first time — it worked fine but I might try not.) Include some of the stems, peeled? (Those can be delicious.) I also love to add a little crushed red pepper to the mix, but again, how much? Also the flavor changes when you add them at the beginning versus near the end. And of course, garlic. How much, how to prepare (slivers? minced? crushed?) and when to incorporate?
The lightly caramelized walnuts needed very little adjustment, I’m happy to say. They were perfect the first time.
I also find it fun to get creative about reducing the number of things I need to wash. I’m really lucky that D always does the dishes after a meal, but even so, I don’t like the idea of using too many implements. For one thing, I have a pretty minimal kitchen set up so I’m forced to reuse certain implements; and for another, I don’t think we should waste time and water and energy on clean up that can be avoided! I prefer to maximize relaxation time after dinner. So I try to think of how to time things, how to recombine ingredients, how to turn almost any dish into a one- or at most two-pot meal.
And yet, even though I love food and cooking, I always seem to struggle with the daily question, “what’s for dinner?” I don’t know why it feels like such a heavy cognitive load sometimes. Maybe it’s because I treat it as a form of creativity, and when I’ve spent a lot of that creative resource on other activities throughout the day, I have so little left for dinner?
And that’s another reason, I suppose, that I like to repeat meals. It lightens the burden of “what’s for dinner” because I can select something familiar, that I already know how to cook, and it becomes like a favorite book one returns to for a reread or a comfort TV show that tells you, hey, it’s going to be okay. Better than okay, it’s going to be good.