To serve man
I need to cook more.
There are several reasons for my new cooking drive, the first being a boredom with eating out. In my rush to get home, I usually just grab a TV dinner from Publix or something to go from a restaurant, and I nearly never pack a lunch to work. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m so bored with all the restaurants around the places I live and work that choosing something to eat has become a chore. I no longer crave any particular food; I simply give up my search for desire and settle on one of the same places I always go. I want something new. Secondly, there’s my health. As you’re probably aware, I’m a bit overweight, and, though turning my commute into a workout has helped a lot, I seem to have bottomed out as far as weight loss. Though there might be some fat to muscle conversion going on in my legs to slow this down, the keys to dietary health are eat less and exercise more, and I’m only doing one of these things. I imagine that most of the things I cook are better for me than the average restaurant fare. I know I’m able to get rid of some of the gut, since I was a lot lighter in college when I was eating one meal a day on average, but I’d like to reach that state without starving myself anemic this time.
My weakness is planning. In the limited time I have at nights, I can’t waste a whole lot making up my mind what to cook, and my leftover management skills are rather poor. The crock pot gives me a means of cooking things during the day, but I’ve already had all of the things in the recipe booklet that looked good, which brings me to my next problem: available recipes. Chris Lumens’s recent posts on food have made me realize that I have similar troubles: though I have a couple of cookbooks for simple, unfrightening recipes given to me by my parents and by Mike, as well as a book of pasta recipes also from my parents, my cache of recipes doesn’t have quite the variety I would like. Also like Chris, I’d like to buy more food locally than from the supermarket, a problem I sometimes solve by visits to that market stand on Mount Vernon, but that’s a secondary problem for now. I want to get into the cooking habit first.
Beginning this weekend, I’m going to try to plan out some meals. To start I’m going to use the recipes I have on hand, maybe starting with my mom’s meatloaf which I haven’t had in a while, but I’ll eventually look for another cookbook for more ideas. When I cook something, I need to figure out beforehand how long leftovers will last, how long I can eat them before becoming bored and how much I should freeze. I need to include lunches in the plan so that I’m not eating so many burritos from that place on Mansell. I need to plan things a week or so in advance so I can have the ingredients and plan how much time I’ll be spending in the kitchen. I need to enjoy food again.