Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe Quick Tips, where we unpack a facet of food culture. Today’s topic, in honor of our 100th Quick Tip, is…basically nothing. Why? Because sometimes, that’s what you want and need. A nice big batch of nothing. I know it’s what I want right now. What, exactly, do I mean? Well, let’s unpack that.

Struggling to Serve

Look, you don’t need me to tell you things are pretty rough right now. Maybe our non-American readers are having a better time, but in America, and in the part of America I am in, there is a LOT to be concerned about in a much more pressing and immediate manner than most of us are used to dealing with: the lack of adequate response to the pandemic, wild-fires, a lot of people in financial turmoil, it’s a whole mess. Today’s post is only going to be KIND of about that, though. It’s more about the broader drive of nothing, and to discuss it, I’m going to explain how I, personally, ate for the last…week and some change. Because here’s the thing: despite running a cooking blog, I have personally struggled to COOK anything since I did those Turkey Burgers at the end of August.

Technically, it was the SECOND BATCH of Turkey Burgers: I made these Sunday night, and then again Monday to use up the extra pound of Turkey.

Since then, I have “cooked”, by which I mean “invested more effort than simply microwaving” TWO meals, one of which was because I needed SOMETHING for this Monday’s post, and the other… well, we’ll get back to that, but the big thing I want to discuss is how that’s FINE. It is alright to not cook. IT can be a good thing,  and there are ways to do it well.

At the most basic level, for instance, remember that not-cooking doesn’t mean “not eating”: while I’ve only COOKED two meals in 17 days, that doesn’t mean I’ve been skipping meals left and right. In fact, I think I’ve missed…arguably 4.5 meals? I had a brunch a while ago, and then didn’t eat till dinner, so I’m calling that ½. And the rest were pretty standard “I was busy when I would normally eat, and never made up for it” situations.

Very busy. Very important work going on. No time.

So, what reasons stop people from cooking, and how can we still take care of ourselves when we choose not to cook?

Time/Energy

This is the big one. There are tons of times when people just don’t have the energy, or feel like they don’t have the time, to cook. A big one for me is in the morning: waking up is often a bit of a process for me, so I am not very good at making breakfasts. I USED to have a go-to breakfast I cooked, but even then, it was two scrambled eggs on a slice of toast, and a second slice of toast with peanut butter. Barely cooking at all, and I made that when I lived alone in a 1 bedroom apartment so I knew when someone was going to need that frying pan. Nowadays, I tend to do more “ready-made” options: I typically get some fruit, a protein shake, and a microwaved turkey-sausage breakfast sandwich. While I was in Leavenworth, I didn’t even go THAT far: my breakfast was about 1/3rd cup Greek Yogurt (I bought a big tub when making the turkey burgers and didn’t want to waste it), with some honey and dark chocolate granola. I stopped eating that when I got home because…the bowls are too far away. Or, I guess, too exposed.

Seriously, that’s a big thing that changes how I personally cook: while at home, the kitchen is upstairs, with a direct line of sight out the front door and into the cul-de-sac when standing at the stove and sink. So when I flop out of bed to feed the cat, I don’t have pants on, and I want to spend as little time as possible where I could get caught with my pants down, as it were. So I grab some pre-made stuff, microwave a sandwich for 2 minutes because I can do that deeper in the kitchen, and boom, breakfast. Does this mean that, if I put in the effort to PUT on pants, I could make myself better breakfasts? Yes. But I rate the irritation of getting dressed as higher than the irritation of getting an OKAY breakfast, rather than a GOOD one.

Doo doo doo, do-do-do doo.

And that’s a very basic, very superficial version of the kind of math people do all the time, and is perfectly valid. Tons of people are time-starved, and simply don’t have the time or energy to cook a lot. People can be sick, or worn out from work, or just dealing with a lot of stress. And while sometimes cooking can be relaxing, other times, it can be a stressful mess, as we oh-so-frequently illustrate here. Other times, it conflicts with other obligations. The past couple weeks, I have been busy from 4 to 8 every Tuesday. Nate wants to eat dinner at 6. These two facts kind of cancel out the ability for me to make dinner on those days, barring a slow-cooker situation. So for most Tuesdays these days, Nate and I eat fast food or left-overs.

I understand skipping cooking, and support it. Do what works for you. That doesn’t mean you can’t take steps to make better choices while doing it, however: for instance, I noted that I eat a turkey sausage sandwich in the morning. That’s because I found that I don’t really notice much of a difference between the Jimmy Dean Turkey sausage breakfast sandwiches and the Normal Pork sausage ones, and swapping saves me 100 calories, 80 mg of Cholesterol, half the fat, and gets me more protein. There’s an ongoing book/magazine line called “Eat This, Not That”, whose core purpose is “Look, I get you’re going to order McDonalds. That’s fine. Just know that a Big Mac is healthier than a Double Quarter Pounder, and the NORMAL quarter-pounder is a little healthier than a Big Mac (more protein, fewer carbs and less fat)”. Taking a bit of time to figure out these facts (best done at another time entirely: you’ll get frustrated if you’re trying to figure out the healthy choice while ordering, and reading the facts right after you eat can sometimes be a bummer) can help you make better choices when you do need a break, OR let you feel like you’re indulging yourself even more when you spring for the bigger option.

I’m not eating this thinking it’s going to be amazing for my health.

Pushing the Boundaries/Taking Some Time

Another reason I wasn’t cooking was because I was trying new things. Specifically, I was going to local restaurants I don’t eat at very often, and ordering what looked nice. This was great for me, because I do derive a lot of fun out of trying new things, AND it’s particularly helpful to smaller businesses that are almost certainly struggling right now. 

If possible, I always try and budget myself to allow one or two new culinary experiences a month, whether dining out or in buying a new frozen dinner. It’s especially useful for ME, since it sometimes gives me an idea for things to make for the site, or gives me feedback on things I did make for the site: when I finally ordered Scallion Pancakes at a restaurant, it taught me how close I got with my version. (The answer: Flavor-wise, pretty close, but I clearly had a much darker understanding of “golden brown”, so mine were much more “crunchy” than “crispy”)

Small detail: I made a “Stab-bing” joke when I wrote this post, because “bing” means “bread”. But I’ve just now realized, a YEAR LATER, that ‘scalding’ was RIGHT THERE. “Scal-bing hot breads!”
You know what, now that I write it out, maybe it’s not as much better as I thought it was.
Bread puns, man. They knead to be perfect. You can’t Loaf around. It's the yeast you can do to get it right. Ciabatta.

And that’s a perfectly valid reason to do take-out, or grab a meal, rather than cook it yourself: to see how it’s SUPPOSED to taste, or to find something new. I personally have several dishes that I think are too difficult to do at home that I’m constantly on the look-out for opportunities to try. Korean Barbecue, in the full sense, is one: ordering meats you cook yourself on a grill with an arrangement of banchan: could it be done at home? Sure, but you’d need to make like, 10 side dishes, and then buy a grill table, and THOSE are typically a couple grand. Sure, I could BUILD one, but that’s still several hundred dollars, AND labor.

I know the text on this is smaller than the site’s (I didn’t know that until I put it up, or I would have made it bigger beforehand) but this is the least expensive legitimate grill table I could find, and it’s $1,895. I found one for $16,000.
What I’m saying is: we are going to need a LOT more Patrons before you see me doing an “at-home Korean Barbecue Bonanza”.

So “getting something you can’t get at home, or as a plan to make at home” is another great reason to not cook. Or, sometimes, the meal is about “maintaining something you get at home”…

Patterns/Traditions

I’ve noted before that, while I myself like pushing for new foods, my family members are more static. My brother finds it frustrating that I actually WANT to read the menu at Wendy’s or Burger King, because he figured out the order he likes from there years ago, and sees no reason to change it. Those patterns offer a lot of solace and peace of mind to people, as can “traditions”.

You know what, fine, sing the song. I want to every time too, and I can’t fight this feeling anymore.
Wait…

For the last 6+ months, my family has eaten at the same restaurant every Sunday, with only a COUPLE weekends where something forced us to change it to Saturday or Monday, or skip it altogether. I think it’s technically been longer, but I know that the Pandemic definitely made it more reliable. That restaurant is Spiro’s. Spiros is a local phenomenon that I might get into in more detail another time, but the one in Port Orchard has existed since 1987, the year before I was born, and my family has gone there all my life. We know the owner, say ‘Hi’ at the grocery store, and talk about shared interests (his family and ours both did Boy Scouts for many years). We go there every Sunday so Nate and my mother can order more food than they intend to eat, to give themselves lunch options over the week. So the Spiro’s order is a weekly Sunday dinner, and also almost a meal-prep for the week.

There are other, more specific traditions families can have: in my family, if you won a little league game, you got to pick a place for dinner, and each of us gets to pick a destination for our Birthday Dinner. Or, rather, we NORMALLY do: since everyone in my family is born after March, THIS YEAR we’ve been a little hampered on that tradition. I’m the only one who’s still technically got a chance, and I doubt this situation is getting solved in under two weeks.

“What a nice picture of the sunset!”
”This is the middle of the afternoon.”

And that kind of stability is another perfectly valid reason to not cook.

The Last Portion

And I’m not saying these are the only reasons not to (though, honestly, with how broad I made the first one, I don’t know how many more reasons there can be), just that these are specifically the ones I personally ran into over the last couple weeks, and in extending myself the freedom to NOT cook for a while, I felt much better.  But there’s one last detail I did want to highlight, and it’s the one meal I haven’t discussed: I’ve microwaved frozen meals, gotten fast food, had left-overs, and cooked for the site, but there was ONE day in here where I “cooked”, and funnily, I personally don’t think it should count.

I have no pictures of it, but on the 5th, I did cook a dinner. Kind of. By MY standards, I didn’t. I used a jar of pre-made sauce, which I dumped over some browned Italian sausage, and let that simmer while I cooked the pasta. Then I tossed some salad greens in dressing, and sprinkled on some cheese and croutons. Then I tossed the pasta in the meat sauce, and sprinkled on some more cheese. (There may have also been some pizza bites baked) It FELT like basically nothing, since it was so low-effort, but the results were lauded by the group.

And it’s an interesting caliber of ‘nothing’, and one of the cool signifiers of how much I’ve grown doing the site: before, I would have called that cooking. Teenage me would have BEAMED at the praise. And to be clear, I’m not saying it’s not cooking: similarly made meals were a cornerstone of my childhood, and similarly simple dishes get discussed here all the time. What’s cool is that I have personally gotten to the point where I didn’t count it. And that’s a great feeling: to know that something I felt took no effort at all was appreciated, filling, and good. It’s the best kind of not cooking: a perfect match of low-effort to high-reward in a two-pan, one-bowl process. It’s a place I hope we can all get to in the kitchen, and one I will certainly be looking for ways to help you get to, as we go on.

Happy 100th Quick Tip, everybody, thanks for reading, and join us next week when I make a Starchy Feast from…Egypt’s technically part of the Middle East, right? Otherwise that rhyme doesn’t work, and Africa is a real pain to rhyme with.

MONDAY: JON UNVEILS AN EGYPTIAN DISH WITH PASTA, LENTILS, RICE, AND MORE.

THURSDAY: I DON’T KNOW, MAYBE A DISCUSSION OF EGYPTIAN CUISINE AS A WHOLE? MAYBE I’LL WATCH SOMETHING THIS WEEKEND.