Baby's First Post

This was a post that I had written a while back, that I never got around to posting on instagram because I couldn’t bring myself to wrestle with the text processing user experience for the Nth time… it’s about how cooking became a bit of a drag ever since I started work, and some thoughts on how I can make it better.

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In the current audiobook that I’m listening to, it suggests that one’s identity is nothing more than the culmination of one’s habits, which makes sense if I think about it. During covid, I tried to cook a new dish every week based on what me or grace was craving and ended up with a lot of experience and knowledge that I apply in my every day cooking.

My parents would often compliment me on my covid dishes, saying that I had great talent compared to them, but in reality I knew the reason why the things I made tasted good was because I followed recipes as closely as possible, compared to my parents who would rarely follow a recipe, and even when they did, they would just eyeball the measurements. Especially my dad, who’s banana bread had a 50/50 chance of coming out of the oven as a piece of semi-sweet rubber. At the time I couldn’t really understand why my parents didn’t want to do the obvious to make their cooking better. But now that I’m living on my own, the exciting recipes that I once enjoyed begin to feel more and more like chores that I have to plow through. Taking the extra time to measure things feels becomes tedious.

One particular time I found myself staring at the ingredients I brought out of the fridge to make one of grace’s favourite dishes, mustering the willpower I needed to assemble everything - green onion and ginger into slivers, fish in the steamer basket, soy sauce, sugar, mirin in a sauce. There was no satisfaction anymore in those tasks, since I’ve done them so many times before.

The times I’ve tried new recipes has also dwindled as there’s just no time or energy on weekdays and I’d rather spend weekends doing more relaxing things. So my perspective on cooking became similar to my parents - as something more of a chore than an interesting hobby.

That was until in my most recent trip to sf, one of grace’s brother’s friends who works at Apple hosted us for a dinner, and cooked an amazing extravagant meal for us. You can imagine the admiration I felt when he brought out heaping piles of dishes, family style, along with a side soup, and later two separate (!) intricately prepared desserts for our big group of 8 to indulge in!

According to him, he’s responsible for his own and two roommates’ meals, and has been frequently hosting dinner parties for years at that point. The secret was to make daily meals as light as possible, with meal prep in large volumes, and save the cooking energy and desire for the dinner parties.

I actually did a version of this when I was in Ottawa on my internship - I meal prepped 5 lunches and 5 dinners every weekend for 8 months, and got so sick meal prep that I swore from that point on to never meal prep again, which I guess is why I forgot that was even an option during my daily cooking in the present. So I think from now on, I will try to do my cooking with meal preparation in mind - not deliberately planning 7 days of meals, but also not making the portion sizes so small that I need to think of what food to cook every single day.