"Can't Cook, Won't Cook"

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Whenever I tried to motivate myself to cook, I’d find a recipe that excited me, then mess it up and be discouraged from trying again. Starting out, small wins are vital. Self-help guru and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss surveyed more than 100,000 of his (mostly male) Facebook fans to discover what turned them off cooking and found an array of reasons: too many ingredients or tools, intimidating skills, different dishes finishing at different times, standing at the stove, food waste. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes that behaviour change starts with identity change. To create new habits, “you need to start believing new things about yourself”. Either way, it is important to find a source that resonates with you. Cooks who wrote lyrically of textures and smells, or who saw every meal as a social celebration, actually reaffirmed my view that I wasn’t refined or gregarious enough to enjoy cooking. Seeing my staples, when I look in the fridge or cupboard, means I feel more capable and inspired – and I would not have known what they were had I not been forced to find out.

Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 10 May 1996". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020. Part of the reason I have been able to go so long without knowing how to cook is that for several years I lived with a friend who enjoyed taking charge in the kitchen. He made dinner; I did the dishes – everyone was happy. But it also made me complacent.In short, I scavenged like a raccoon. I wrote cooking off as “not my thing” alongside, say, basketball. And I am not alone. Part of scaling up in the kitchen, Johansen suggests, is finding “like-minded” people to cook for, who are less concerned about what’s on the menu than enjoying each other’s company. “People are generally very grateful to be fed,” she says. Since my kitchen awakening, however, I have had friends for dinner once or twice a week. I rarely make anything fancy – just a bowl of stew or pasta, or daal eaten on our laps on the sofa; delicious and nourishing – but this is something I would not have thought I’d ever be comfortable doing. With attitudes to food shaped in childhood, these retrograde ideas can be insidious. The novelist Hanya Yanagihara recently said that she “deliberately never learned” to cook as a teenager for fear of being trapped in the domestic sphere; I suspect my own historical resistance was similar. But it is exhilarating to realise that your identity is not fixed. Start by deciding that you can cook, “then prove it to yourself with small wins”, writes Clear. Not every recipe is reliable. Cookbooks have at least gone through a process of recipe-testing and copy-editing; a top Google search result can just reflect good SEO. “Frankly, there are a lot of bad recipes out there,” Johansen says.

More important is maintaining a rhythm. Where I used to cook once and eat it night after night, I now freeze the other portions or add an element I’ve made from scratch, so as not to break my cooking streak.Relying on leftovers is often a practical necessity if you’re cooking for yourself, but if you didn’t quite pull off the recipe, leftovers taste of failure – and if you did, you may not want to repeat it once you’ve eaten it three nights in a row. After four months of living alone, I have learned that I cannot be without Greek yoghurt, kale, cannellini beans, peanut butter, sour cream, chilli flakes, spinach and frozen chapati breads.