The Number One Reason You Don't Feel Like Cooking

For the past few months, I haven't been that interested in cooking. It's easy to imagine why—I just took on a new (amazing!) full-time job here at Epi and also put my family's apartment on the market, a process that required weekend after weekend of purging and cleaning and painting to get the space ready for showings. In sum: I've had a lot going on. My kids have been eating a lot of plain, buttered pasta.A lot.

How Cooking 90 Meals in One Month Changed My Cooking Forever

But on a recent sunny weekend morning, I found myself walking over to the farmers' market for the first time in weeks. I browsed the lush, overflowing stalls, tasting samples ofsautéed shishito peppers, spicy bean sprouts, and white nectarines as I shopped. At home, after unpacking bags of peaches and basil and corn and tomatoes, I started to cook. I put two cups of lentils up to boil. Ipeeled and choppedsweet little kirby cucumbers. I gently simmered ears of corn, just to the point past rawness. I felt more productive and relaxed than I'd felt in weeks.

Why this rush of culinary energy? It could have been the sunshine, or the relief of having successfully pulled off an open house for prospective buyers the day before. Or the nagging guilt I've felt about feeding my children a basically all-carb diet. But it wasn't that.

I wanted to cook—in fact, I was itching to cook—because my kitchen was clean. Because of our pending apartment sale, our normally cluttered house was immaculate. The dishwasher had been cleared. The sink was sparkling and empty. The counters had been cleared; all the mail and keys and tiny plastic figurines were stashed away, each in its own designated place. The bareness, the order, the unusually organized pantry shelves—it was invigorating.

Now, some people can walk into amessy kitchenand just get cooking. I, however, am not one of them, and I suspect many of you aren't either. The thought of having to deal with a sink full of dishes before I can even fill a pot with water fills me with dread. If I have to wade through a pile of unopened mail to make room for a cutting board on my counter, then I'd rather just order takeout. After a long day, it can be hard enough to work up the energy to make dinner, even for those of us who love to cook. All of that clutter, all of those unfinished tasks, are just extra mental and physical barriers between me and a home-cooked meal.

My recent cooking session was so rewarding, in terms of both an uplift in my moodandan objectively marked improvement in the quality of my family's meals throughout the week that followed, that I vowed to keep clean from now on. Since the idea of keeping my apartment permanently up for sale in order to ensure ongoing tidiness seems a bit...drastic, I'm planning to do the following instead:

1. Clear my sink every morning before work and every night before bed.We (almost) always do our dishes before bed, but with two working parents and two young daughters, mornings are very hectic. Still, it doesn't take much more time to stick a dish in the dishwasher than it does to put it in the sink.

2. Clear the dishwasher every morning.In order to put said dishes in the dishwasher, however, the dishwasher needs to be cleared of clean dishes. My husband and I are going to try to make a habit of doing that as soon as we get up.

3. Keep mail and papers out of the kitchen.I'm a relatively organized person, but mail is my downfall. I can never stay on top of it. But for now we've designated a basket close to our front door where we're going to put our mail every evening, so it never even comes near the kitchen counter. We'll see how long it lasts!

4. Clear the kitchen counters of random, non-kitchen-related items nightly.Clean surfaces just attract stuff, especially when children are around. Among the items I found on my kitchen counter when I came home last night: a hand-painted porcelain figurine, a child's bathing suit, and one of those long plastic claws for grabbing things off of high shelves. Why? (No, seriously:Why?)

5. Give myself permission to order in takeout once a week—guilt-free—so I have a chance to catch up on keeping the kitchen clean.If one night of takeout and tidying helps lead to six nights of homemade, non-monochromatic meals, it will be well worth it.