I got through the first couple days of myself-imposed cooking challengewithout incident, but on the third day, there they were: my nagging cooking anxieties, making another appearance. The trigger was a pair of Instagram comments. On aphotoof a soft-boiled egg: "This counts as cooking!?" Onanother photoof, uh, soft-boiled eggs (this time with crackers): "Aren't crackers processed food? Not trying to be a jerk, just saying."
Fair questions for somebody who's announced to the world that he's going to cook 90 meals in January (including recipes never tried before!) (and new cuisines!). But the questions that arose in me in reaction to those comments—Does the way I cook really count as cooking? What exactly consists of cooking, anyway?—precedes #cook90 by months.
They first made an appearance over the summer. I was at a beach house with friends, and it was my night to cook. I threw peppers, onions, eggplant, and some hot Italian sausages on the grill. I toasted some bread and spooned on tomatoes and garlic. And I made the world's simplest kale salad, dressed with nothing more than olive oil, lemon juice, salt. I piled all this onto platters, and walked the platters to the table. Right before I set the food down, I froze.
The food was too simple. My friends would ask where the real meal was. Where's the pizza, where's the slow-smoked pork shoulder? They wouldn'tget它。就这样,我没有得到它either-what was I thinking? So before anybody had a chance to take a bite, I apologized.
Now, months later, Instagram commenters were asking questions similar to the ones that paralyzed me: How simple can cooking get before it's not considered cooking anymore?
I asked myself that question on Wednesday night, when I pureed the leftover squash, fennel, and grapes from the previous night'ssheet-pan dinnerinto a soup, finishing it with a little cognac and za'atar. It was delicious, satisfying food (if not very Instagramable), and yet I felt guilty. The soup had come together so quickly, I had dirtied only one pot, and I was comfortably watching Season 2 of Silicon Valley (I'm late, I know) in no time. I wondered if I hadn't cooked but instead had cheated.
The next morning, I took the question to Twitter. What counts as cooking, and what is merely...preparing? Ideas poured in. One reader suggested that if it was hot, you had cooked it. Another reader pointed to sushi, saying "if you put both thought/effort into the ingredients/assembly, then it's cooking."
And I came up with an answer of my own. I wrote back to a few of my commenters on Instagram, admitting that I'd decided to cook every night not to be some sort of hero, or some cooking machine, but because I want to know that I can depend on myself—I can depend on my skills in the kitchen—to keep myself fed. So if I prepared it, if I sliced it, if I took it from raw ingredients to assembled dish—I'm gonna go ahead and call that cooking. And if one dish morphs into another? Even better. (That's#wasteless, girl!)
Of course, just because I cook it doesn't mean that I'm growing as a cook while I do so. And growing as a cook—challenging myself—is one of my #cook90 goals. So if week one was about getting through the days with simple cooking, week two will be about picking up new recipes, new techniques. They need not be simple—what is when you do it the first time anyway? Thankfully, when it comes to cooking, the more you do it, the simpler it gets.
