Cooking for idiots who hate cooking
Okay I tried this on Threads on Friday night and it totally backfired, but I’ll try it here because this might be a better format.
I am a bad cook who hates cooking. I’m going to repeat that for the people in the cheap seats, because it’s really important:
I am a bad cook who hates cooking. I’ve coasted my whole life being able to microwave things, bake things at a basic level, grill things with no skill or finesse, or just eat stuff that’s already ready to go. I’ve lost 40 pounds this year so far by eating a steady diet of light yogurt, single serving tuna fish packets, cans of light soup, and jello. It’s super easy to prepare, takes no thought or effort, and is easy to track.
It’s also not sustainable long term.
But when it comes to cooking, the thought of dicing up 6 ingredients while preparing a sauce or glaze as I weigh food on a food scale and keep 5 plates spinning all at once and spending an hour in the kitchen so I can eat in a meal in 10 minutes is absolutely abhorrent and makes me want to have a panic attack.
In fact that’s exactly what happened on Friday night. I asked Threads for advice for an idiot who hates cooking, and the thread was almost immediately flooded with comments from expert cooks who love cooking, offering technical jargon and huge multi-step meals and while I think they were genuinely trying to be helpful, they were unwilling or unable to recognize that “quick, easy, and fun” are radically different things for someone with cooking experience who loves doing it, versus an idiot novice who hates it. I ended up having a panic attack and a meltdown as I got flooded with advice aimed at someone clearly better than me and I felt increasingly stupid and inadequate while having horrific thoughts of what the “reality” of cooking must be and my mind snapped and I cried into a pillow for 2 hours and almost called the suicide prevention hotline. I am deadly serious when I say all of that actually happened.
So for the love of god, calibrate your advice. If you throw around words like “braise” or “sear” or “sautee” or “broil” without explaining what they mean and making them sound unbelievably easy to learn or do, I am going to bounce right off of it. I know how to bake, grill, microwave, and boil. That’s it. I can learn, but assume I am a scared child who needs their hand held in the process.
Here’s an example of what not to do: try to convince me that I should make my own soup from scratch. When I have 130 calorie cans of low sodium soup that cost $2.50 apiece that I can have ready in under a minute, there is absolutely no way you can convince me that making my own soup is cheaper, easier, faster, or healthier than what I’m already doing. If you offer advice like that, you have misunderstood the assignment.
I have minimal tools at my disposal, and while I am not opposed to getting more provided an idiot child can easily learn to use them, my kitchen is a little small. Here’s what I have right now:
- bowls of various sizes, from big to pretty small
- what appears to be a non-stick pan
- other pans and lids of different sizes
- what looks to be a fairly comprehensive knife set
- spatulas with and without holes
- a not-huge baking sheet
- a rice cooker
- a wooden spoon
- an oven
- a 4 burner stovetop
- a microwave
- a shitty medium sized grill that I can sort of control the temperature of without precision. For the record I actually think grilling is kind of neat and I don’t hate it!
I know a slow-cooker is probably a good investment, but I do not know how to use one, and the easier you can make it seem to use, the better.
Consider this a challenge to convince a total novice who hates cooking that cooking can be an easy, fun, and rewarding experience that they can learn in baby steps without giving them a literal panic attack or making them feel like more of a fucking moron than they already do.