In the end the hashtag ended up being a lie. I didn't end up cooking 90 meals during my ominously-named#cook90 initiative, because on the weekends I usually cooked just two meals a day. This never crossed my mind when, on January 1st, I hastily slapped a name on my last-minute New Year's resolution.
But I'll tell you what: I'd do it again. Because what else would I call it—#cook82? Girl, please.
So maybe I failed. But maybe I didn't. As I write this, it's the day after #cook90 ended, and I have two sheet pans in the oven: one with four servings of chicken, the other withspaghetti squash and red onion. I know that I'll eat a little tonight for dinner, and more for lunch tomorrow. I know this, becauseI meal-planned it. And when I wrote my list of what I would cook for breakfast, lunch, and dinner this week, I didn't consider that I could stop just because it's February now, that I could order Thai food all week, that the chains were off.
Because they aren't off. They're more like, I don't know, bracelets or something. I want to keep them on.
还为时过早永。螺旋式排布说我的习惯tly changed. But I'm optimistic that they have, because somewhere around day 26 I noticed a shift. Waking up and packing five pounds of tupperware'd meals into my bag no longer felt strange. More surprising, it didn't feel like a hassle. Cooking everything I ate became less of a thing I had to remind myself to do and more a natural behavior.
I did get restless. Going into week four of #cook90, I'd only usedone of my three passes. But in my final week I officially used the other two. This had less to do with food than it did with simply getting out of my house and stepping away from my countertop, which I was getting sick of looking at. The funny thing? Every time I used one of my passes to eat at a restaurant, I was indifferent to the food, knowing that I would have been just as satisfied with the meals I'd been cooking at home.
But #cook90 was never about not eating out. It was about thinking differently about how I approach the daily act of feeding myself. I wanted to see if I could shift my thinking and accept cooking as a thrice-daily act.
I think I did. And coming out of #cook90 I know what's possible. I know that very simple cooking is what makes day-in, day-out cooking manageable. I know that on days when I want to cook a little more ambitiously,having all the ingredients in my fridgeis crucial. I know a little aboutmaking real Indian food, and a little about the dangers of making, uh, less real Indian food. (When you've made the former, curry recipes from anglo Britsjust don't cut it). And I know that no matter how easy or fast or unfamiliar the recipe, the very act of cooking is as satisfying as the act of eating. (If I were a car salesman, I'd note that that's100% growth in satisfaction.)
So why would I stop now?
I'll admit that on the last official night of #cook90, I cooked in a celebratory way. I thought I should make something luxurious, like some fat T-bone steaks, or something I'd never made before, like sushi. In the end I settled on pizza. I made a big batch of dough and invited a few folks over, and we ate it standing around my countertop (with, I should note, a particularly good bottle of Champagne I'd hidden in my fridge on New Year's).
I had designs to serve a simple salad, but the big bowl of kale sat undressed on my counter all night—nobody was interested. I did make some cookies, though. They were supposed to be short, chunky things, but almost immediately they spread out into thin, ugly orbs. The oven, which had been at 500 degrees for the pizza, was simply still too hot. I served the cookies anyway, but the bottoms were burned, and nobody liked them very much.
If this had happened to me two months prior, I would have been a mortified, overly-apologetic mess. But now I just shrugged, muttered "these aren't very good, huh?", and poured myself some more Champagne. I'd be cooking again in less than eight hours. I had plenty of chances ahead of me to get it right.
