*This “you” is a composite of the many people whose kitchens I’ve snooped in. Don’t worry, your identity is safe with me!
If I have spent any time at your house, then you have caught me rooting through your fridge.
Later, despite a puzzled look or even a rebuke, you have seen me give a guilty start when you found me in your pantry.
Then you caught me red-handed sorting your plastic storage containers and quite possibly trying to throw some of them out.
Yes, it’s a bad habit, but if I have been engaged in such nefarious activities in your kitchen, then you know that I also ended up cooking you dinner.
You liked this part.
The one is logically connected to the other. Please sit back, digest, and allow me to explain.
I started my independent cooking life on the budget end of the spectrum. You could call it frugal and make it sound like a virtue, or poor and make it sound like oppression, but it wasn’t either. I just had only so much money and could buy only so much stuff, plain and simple. It was not cost effective to buy stuff I wouldn’t eat or waste it after the fact. It was great training, and I wouldn’t trade it now for the world. You burn and bin things a lot less often if it is the domestic equivalent to setting fire to dollars.
Nowadays, in the complacency of middle age, when I don’t have to parcel out one bottle of wine into three containers for three separate recipes but can consume fresh heavy cream with impunity, I am capable of talking myself into chucking out things I’ve made that I really don’t like, though I still cringe inside. But the waste-resistance is built into me through sheer monetary restriction in a way that no amount of ecological shaming or virtue signaling could ever accomplish.
And this is why I get really fascinated when I snoop in other people’s kitchens.
Wastefulness in the kitchen, I have found, is no respecter of incomes. It might come from warehousing too many non-perishables that never actually get eaten (all that locked capital! I think in despair. Haven’t you heard of an index fund? Couldn’t you be starting a small business?). Or it might come from buying too many perishables at the grocery store because you’re so strapped for time you can shop only once every two weeks—a state afflicting the working poor and working rich alike. Or you just don’t have any discipline, can’t curb your impulse buys, and refuse to make do with what you’ve got.
This is why I’ve found a kilo of fish fillets shoved at the back of your fridge, two weeks out of date and moonlighting as a murder weapon. This is why I’ve found five cans of the exact same vegetable that you don’t even like stashed in various cupboards as if hiding from each other. This is why I have surreptitiously ditched the slimy cilantro that has been weeping underneath a stack of woody carrots in your crisper. This is why I have found items in your freezer older than my kid.
It’s also why on the very same evening you despaired that there’s nothing in the house to eat, I have spread your table with a cornucopia of delights foraged from your unpromising stash.
OK, so I’m bragging a little. But not to put you down. To pull you up! It’s all there—more than you need, actually. You can so do this.
Here are some things you can do to wrest back control of your kitchen. Don’t try to do them all at once. Take it nice and slow, and after one of them has become a habit, ease into another.
1. Never, ever shop without a list. Where does the list come from? You keep a piece of paper on the counter and write down what you run out of only when you’ve run out of it. You will survive a couple extra days without lemons or butter. Going without for that period of time will inspire creative alternatives anyway.
2. Sort through your stash, starting with the dry goods. You probably have so many overlapping pastas you could wait out another pandemic. Make a list of them all (if you’re a list kind of person) and start crossing them off as they’re used up. Or, put them somewhere annoyingly prominent and use them up over the next few days—or weeks—or months. Use up everything that is nonperishable. (If you keep emergency rations, store them somewhere other than the kitchen, like the basement.) You are not allowed to buy more noodles, lentils, or cookies until all the ones you already have are gone.
3. Do the same thing with your freezer. Dig down deep! Dredge stuff up. If it’s more than a year old, ditch it. Food does actually deteriorate even in a freezer.
4. For pantry, freezer, and fridge alike: admit if you don’t like something, and then get rid of it. If it’s nonperishable you can donate it somewhere. (Though this always reminds me of that exchange between Maria and Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music: “When we entered the abbey our worldly clothes were given to the poor.” “What about this one?” “The poor didn’t want this one.”) If it’s perishable and you got it because it was fashionable or cheap or “good for you” but you just don’t like it… get rid of it. Then don’t buy it again.
5. Once your larder starts to look bare, you can slowly start filling it again. But don’t fill it up. (Remember, the emergency rations are in the basement. Kitchen is for daily life.) You literally don’t see most of what’s in your fridge or pantry because it’s too full. Think of the irony—you are not eating the food in your house because there is too much, not too little! Then it spoils and you have to throw it out. Throwing away food is throwing away money. Don’t do that. If you have a hard time mustering the self-discipline, let’s agree that every time you find something spoiled or out of date in your kitchen, you will PayPal me a dollar. OK? I’m willing to do this for your sake.
6. Finally, do this same vetting process with your equipment. I can pretty much guarantee you that you have too many plastic storage containers. Get rid/throw out. Find out how many spatulas you have. Keep two and donate the rest. Same for wooden spoons and measuring spoons and measuring cups. Broken electronics. Cracked bowls. Gadgets you have used once or less. Or even three times or less. (Seriously, how often are you going to crank your own fresh fettucine? Even I don’t do that.)
You’ve probably picked up on the theme by now: you don’t like being in your kitchen because you feel like you’re drowning in it. Too much food and yet nothing to eat. Too many potential projects and no time to do them in. You don’t go into the kitchen because you don’t like to be there, but then you have to go in when you’re hungry, at which point the crisis has already struck and pizza delivery is the path of least resistance. It’s also really expensive. Money is literally flooding out of your overstuffed kitchen.
Do what you can to manage the stuff. That alone may be enough to transform your attitude to cooking. But if you still find yourself shying away and itching toward takeout, it’s time to take a deep breath and acknowledge what’s missing: skills.
This probably irritates you to no end, because to the person who’s skilled it all seems so easy, right? But I assure you I did not start out with any more skills than money. My main asset was gluttony, which is a pretty good guide toward making good food, but it sure isn’t failsafe. I shudder now to think of some of my early horrors, such as a wokful of mushy rice noodles oozing around in coconut cream (which it turns out is not the same thing as coconut milk) and so many chilis that the fire department showed up.
Heck, I still make food that I expect to turn out delicious and in fact is… not. I know this will sound like a creativity-guru cliché, but it actually is true: you have to fail in order to succeed. In cooking as in so many other things in life.
So here are some tips on learning to like to cook without anxiety or crippling shame or debilitating cost.
1. Shun celebrity/chef/celebrity chef cookbooks. These are status objects, not actual instructions in preparing food.
2. Shun recipes, cookbooks, or cooking gurus who promise quick, easy meals that are quick and easy on account of expensive ingredients. You don’t need any skill to make something delicious with gruyère, chèvre, baby lamb chops, beef tenderloin, lump crabmeat, fresh blackberries, pine nuts, pistachios, or asparagus. Those kinds of recipes just trade money for skill. If you’ve got the money, by all means enjoy your asparagus with lump crabmeat and artisanal balsamic. But if you need to eat well on a lot less, skill will make up the difference.
3. Start with something you really, really like and get good at. Just one thing. Hummus? Make a lot of hummus. Look at a variety of recipes. Some are heavy on tahini, others on olive oil. Cumin or not? Garlic or not? Lemon juice or citric acid? (The latter is better—no joke. But it took me about 15 years of making hummus to discover that.) Whichever you land on, I promise it will be both better and cheaper than the kind you buy pre-made. Or, beef stew. Here’s a tip: Americans almost never manage to cook their beef long enough, and they choose cuts that are too expensive. Get the absolutely cheapest cut of beef you can find (chuck is fine; if you are so lucky as to find shank at an Asian or Latino market, snap it up), brown it, add whatever liquids you’re experimenting with (red wine? white wine? beer? tomatoes? water with lots of veg and herbs?), and simmer it as long as you can stand to, until the meat is literally falling apart. Besides the pleasing built-in variation, any cooking skill you develop in one area will extend into another.
4. Change it up. If you hate cooking, it’s probably because you’ve cooked the same things over and over and the very thought of them kills your appetite. You don’t need to go in for a total cuisine conversion or equipment overhaul to do this—certainly not if you’re wrangling little kids. But if you always do salmon and tilapia and have never tried any of the other fish fillets at the store, try a new one. You can’t go wrong with fish fillets if you cook them on low heat in butter and then squirt on some lemon. And cook them a lot less than you think they need—really just till they have gone opaque all the way through. Or, if you always do chicken breasts, try skin-on bone-in chicken thighs, salted and peppered, pan-fried over medium-low heat in plenty of olive oil ten minutes on the skin side, twenty minutes the other side, and then ten minutes more on the skin side. You can put on just about any flavoring on them (soy sauce? tomato sauce? vinaigrette?) and they’ll be amazing.
5. Make it up. If your ingredients aren’t too expensive to begin with, there’s less cost to getting it wrong, and more payoff to discovering something amazing. My favorite cheap discovery of the past year is what an amazingly good grilled cheese sandwich you can make with pimento cheese. (Easy homemade version: grated cheap supermarket cheddar, mayo, scallions, roasted red pepper from a jar. Maybe some garlic.) If you’re out of something, just try something else in the same general category. It may not be as good. Or it may be better.
6. If all else fails, just invite me over to your house again. I’ll be happy to cook you dinner. But I’m tossing the cilantro, OK?