make cooking boring
Ask any kitchen professional and they’ll tell you: to be a cook is to be a craftsperson. Not an artist pushing the very idea of food to its limits. The most incredible dish you’ve ever tasted was made by someone who followed a detailed plan, using a few techniques they’ve practised a million times and a handful of tools that are perfect for them specifically, and who spends as much time cleaning their space as they do cooking in it – all so that they can reliably churn out the ideal plate of the same exact dish a hundred times a day with minimal wastage.
In my kitchen at least, a fun experimentation session always comes with a trade-off. Sauce to wipe off the walls. Dreaded piles of twice as many dishes as I needed. A prematurely-added ingredient tasting strongly of charcoal. 9.30pm dinners when the cooking time turns out much longer than expected.
So maybe counterintuitively, I believe that one of the best ways to cook exciting food is to make cooking boring. When you remove dozens of small decisions from the process ahead of time, you get to give your full attention to the ingredients you are putting together. To do this, you have to learn to do things now so you don’t have to do them later, and to get really familiar with a small list of ingredients that fit your taste and an even smaller list of tools that work perfectly for you.
Here’s the real magic of it: in their own time, all the below things become second nature. Then, you can exclusively focus on playing with your food while the cleaning and organising takes care of itself.
Clean as you go
Repeatedly doing the dishes and wiping your counters down is not the sexiest part of cooking, but it might be the most important.
Like many, I’ve spent my adult life sharing cramped kitchens with other people who also eat at regular meal times. The only way I’ve been able to make fairly elaborate dishes in these circumstances is by cleaning throughout the whole cooking process.
I don’t mean “stop everything and get the mop bucket out” – I mean use each second of idle time you have to make your life easier. Put the ingredients you’ve already used back in the pantry, and the utensils you won’t need again in the sink. Keep a towel on your shoulder and wipe any mess you make as soon as you make it. Clean your dishes two spoons at a time in between stirring the pot, so that once your meal is ready, you can just sit down and eat it.
Consider making a game plan
One of my most used kitchen utensils is a notebook. In it, I write lists of ingredients loitering in my fridge so I can arrange them into dishes and play-by-play game plans for entire meals. Think, then execute.
Take my most extreme example, when I hosted an eight-person, buffet-style Christmas meal with 12 dishes last year. I spread the cooking over about three days and used up every last piece of cookware, serving dish and square millimetre of fridge space I had.
I put my friends’ dietary requirements and preferences into a spreadsheet. I made multiple shopping lists and determined the perfect day to get ingredients to maximise freshness and storage space. I wrote the name of each dish on a sticky tab so I could keep track of what I would cook or serve it in. I worked backwards from the time a dish had to be ready, the oven temp it needed, whether it could be par-cooked, how long it should rest, and wrote myself instructions in 15-minute increments. I prepared lists of jobs my friends could help with ahead of time. And, if I may say so, we nailed it.
Is this insane behaviour? Yeah. Maybe. But the other option was going full The Bear season 2 episode 6, so I stand by it.
Pare down your pantry
Hands up if there’s a long-expired spice container you bought for one (1) dish you never made again lurking at the back of your pantry, judging your every movement!
It’s time to let it go. Marie Kondo that cabinet. Look deep into the eyes of every spice, herb, dried good, can, condiment, oil, vinegar in there and ask yourself: how often do I use that, really? Is it close enough in taste or function to another one that I put in everything? Do I actually know how to cook with it?
Take your time with that one. Watch your own process over a few weeks or months, and you will find that you instinctively reach for certain ingredients more often, while that fancy spice mix that only really goes with one dish gathers dust in the back of the cupboard. It does not matter how chic it feels to be someone who owns five types of salt if you realistically only use one or two.
You only need two knives
All you need are a big, sturdy chef’s knife and a small, nimble paring knife that you keep clean and sharp to do any home kitchen job. That’s it.
I’m only human and I, too, peruse knife taxonomies as a hobby. I am fascinated by how many blade types there are out there: how length, width, thickness, bevel, weight and flexibility makes a tool perfect for its job, why certain cultures use cleavers or swords, how different the knives in a same category can look.
However, I do mean need. Absolutely get a filleting knife if you buy whole fish on the daily – but don’t think you can’t call yourself a cook until you’ve got one.
Repeating meals is not a crime
Eating the same thing often or even multiple days in a row can make your decision process easier. It can allow you to use up produce before it goes mouldy on you or make the best of an ingredient’s peak season. It can help you master your own take on a specific recipe through incremental improvements. It can turn one Sunday batch-cooking session into a week’s worth of work lunches. And as
explains in her “Meal repeating” post, it can also save you from feeling compelled to “perform” your meals to an audience.Embrace it! To be cringe is to be free! If you like that meal, eat it until you can’t anymore, and post it on your Instagram story every damn day if you so wish!
On that last note, if anyone reading this has once said they “don’t eat leftovers”, please DM me and explain what the fuck. I cannot wrap my mind around yesterday’s dinner becoming its own, repulsive food group. No amount of putting myself in somebody’s shoes has seemed to help and I need exterior intervention.
If you have any opinions about this post or any of my previous ones, I’d love to know! Please leave a comment, DM me, or fill out this survey and I’ll be forever grateful for the feedback.