I can't be bothered to cook
A non-guide to culinary listlessness
The irony has not escaped me that I am sending out this newsletter about a feeling of weariness in the kitchen two weeks after I meant to, because I kept not getting around to it. As in cooking, so in life, I suppose.
But I am reemerging from a particularly hectic period, and with it, getting back to this newsletter, which is one of my favourite things to fill my time with, when I do have time to fill. So here we go with something that I specifically did not want to be an advice article, but a musing on a very specific feeling that we all inevitably feel at some point.
I was walking home from my local shop clutching two limes, two heads of garlic and a bottle of barbeque sauce when I realised I couldn’t be bothered to cook the meal I had just bought those final ingredients for.
I trudged back into my flat, ruminating on the dilemma, and trying to get to the root of what I was feeling. In the end, I forced myself to make the Nigel Slater chicken wings I had planned. They were delicious, but I got very little joy out of the whole experience.
For a good week afterwards, I was plagued by a feeling of listlessness every time dinner time came around. Working out what I wanted to cook each night felt like pulling teeth, not so much because I couldn’t decide what I wanted, but because I couldn’t settle on anything that didn’t seem like an absolutely insurmountable effort to make. It was not the first time I have gone through such a period, and it will not be the last.
There is a ubiquitous genre of food blog article/tweet/lifestyle piece/listicle whose basic premise is to offer easy suggestions of what to cook when you don’t feel like cooking. I’m not sure whether most of the people who have written such an article have ever felt the true anguish of not wanting to cook.
I am a person who spends more of my waking life ruminating on my next meal than anything else, and even I am not immune to feelings of culinary can’t be arsed-ness. They tend to come in waves, and the latest one led me to conclude that where these articles go wrong is that they focus on the problem of not wanting to cook as a practical one, rather than what I believe it to be: an existential one.
What interests me in what follows is not offering a solution to such feelings (indeed, I’m not sure it’s possible: some things just suck, and that’s life) but exploring what is behind them, the root cause.
For me it comes down to a few factors, including not wanting to wash up, and living alone – which I love and wouldn’t change for the world – but which also means I don’t have someone to bounce ideas off or shape my thinking: when anything is possible it can feel like nothing is.
The problem is not a lack of easy recipes. I can make carbonara with my eyes closed. I always have what I need to make potato wedges and some kind of protein. I usually have one ‘quick meal’ component in the fridge or freezer: filled pasta, gyoza, fish fingers. But when the feeling of ‘can’t be bothered’ hits, even these easy fixes feel like too much. Too many pans, too much movement, chopping, washing, reaching for equipment, wiping, drying.
Being told that a recipe is easy is not enough to shake us out of a funk like this in which everything feels like too much effort. Hume argued that reason alone was never enough to drive us to action. Well, neither was a ‘dinner on the table in 15’ recipe.
If this is a psychological explanation for how hard it is to shake the feeling of culinary listlessness, I think it also merits an experiential explanation. The truth is, even for those of us who love it, cooking is, as Julia Turshen so perfectly put it in a recent newsletter ‘relentless’. If you feel burnt out from the repetition of cooking for yourself and your dependents, you rarely have but a few hours to recover until you have to start the task all over again.
The problem is not the difficulty of any one specific meal that needs to be cooked, but the cumulative effect of the meals that need to be prepared day after day.
It doesn’t help that the video-forward era of social media courtesy of TikTok and reels reinforces the illusion of ease in the kitchen. Clever editing, swishy equipment and invisible washing up all conspire to make cooking appear a good deal less messy than it truly is.
Decluttered representations of cooking at home have been with us for years in the form of TV cookery, but the speed and immediacy of 30-second clips of ‘easy weekday dinners’ that use seven pans have never been quite so intense.
I promised that this was not going to offer advice, and I stand by that. So all I will say is: these feelings are very real and they happen, and whatever coping mechanism you find for them is probably fine. Frozen pizza? Great! Peanut butter toast made straight on the kitchen counter because you don’t want to reach for a plate? Why not! Crisps and dip? Sure!
My only nugget of knowledge is that the slow march of needing to cook will never leave us, so take a break when you need to. If and when the desire comes back, enjoy it while it lasts. But don’t beat yourself up on the days when even those ‘easy recipes for when you don’t feel like cooking’ seem like an absolute mountain.
Baker’s dozen
13 good things from the past few weeks:
Had a whole Sunday where all I did was sit and read and it was excellent.
On the subject of reading, there have been some great ones recently: I particularly enjoyed finally getting around to My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Outline, and my first thriller of the year (if you know me, you know I love a thriller), Lee Child’s One Shot.
I’ve been watching a lot of Columbo recently, probably inspired by Rebecca May Johnson. Would recommend.
Speaking of Rebecca May Johnson, her recent newsletter on ‘A small pot of cream’ filled me with joy.
I’ve re-started Yoga and it’s been great. I’m finding more and more that doing a mix of different kinds of exercise is the best way to keep motivated.
New activewear!
I took advantage of a spare Eurostar ticket from a while ago to have a few days in London and see some of my favourite people. Loved Suzy Tros for Greek food, was terrorised by a waiter’s timekeeping at Paradise, and ate some very good ramen at Heddon Yokocho.
Stocked up on good tea, books, hot cross buns and creme eggs on said trip to London.
Made a blood-orange trifle to take to taco night.
Cooked carbonara for my girls again.
Made my egg white brownies with the leftovers from the above carbonara.
Finally made something from the monthly Bucket List Bake Club, my first ever Hamantaschen!
My angel friend bought me beautiful flowers because the ones I bought myself smelled of pee (Miley never warned us about that).
Wise beyond your years, honest and always beautifully crafted, write on........X