What's Cooking

Here's the weird thing: I've always loved cooking. I love the calm it brings me when I'm cutting vegetables, I love plating food up like it's gourmet, I love thinking up unique recipes, and watching the people I love eat it all up.

Maybe that's the thing - I've always been a very cook-for-an-occasion/person kinda person. And now, all of a sudden, I find I'm all alone and in charge of cooking all three meals a day every single day. Let's not forget these are boring everyday adult meals. The kind I barely ever even eat. 

It's... daunting. I mean, I'm constantly thinking about food, what's ready, what's not, what more I need to buy, when I need to set aside time to soak the next daal, because when you cook adult food, everything has to be pre-planned eons before. It's gotten to the point where while I'm washing up one vessel, I'm already thinking of what goes into it next.

I still love cooking but it's getting harder to remember that I love it, as opposed to just resenting it because I'm doing it so freaking often. My brain's so not programmed to enjoy repetition or routines. What really sucks is I'm not cooking what I love to eat, I'm cooking what I know adults around me expect me to eat. It's always kind of an anti-climax.

It's also frustrating because I actually have a life in Chennai and I'm stuck trying to juggle my social schedule with my work schedule with the cooking monster - yes, it has become a monster now.

Some part of me knows that I should just rearrange my brain, get used to cooking for ME, as opposed to cooking for an audience. Start cooking simpler stuff. Toss in a sandwich/pasta day every so often instead of making two-course everything all the time. Compromise on some part of my weekend to stay home and do the fun cooking I don't get the time to do over the week.

Most importantly, stop insisting on making everything fresh from scratch, and refrigerate raw ingredients more often. Oh, and stop thinking of ways to completely eliminate fat (it's been three weeks y'all, and I haven't included oil or potatos or ghee or butter or... a zillion other things... in anything I made). All my time probably goes into obsessing over the calories in my food.