Chris Plays Gourmet

On New Years Eve, while half drunk, I decided to make a New Year’s Resolution: I would cook one meal, on average, every week, in 2019.

So, it’s been a while since I’ve done any updates on my cooking status! I have kept cooking, which is good, but have done a less thorough job of documenting my journey. Here’s where we are today: I have been cooking regularly. With the exception of taking two weeks off related to travel, I have continued to cook regularly – at least two meals a week, and a couple months ago, upgraded to three meals a week....

Tonight, I was in a rush to cook: both of my blue apron meals tonight were in the longer side on prep time, and I got home somewhat later than intended, and wanted to get food on the table. As a result of being in a rush, I did something that I regret in hindsight: I started cooking without setting everything I’d need aside first.

Last week, I cooked my 6th Blue Apron meal: Calabrian Shrimp and Orzo. Overall evaluation: this meal was good, but as our fifth of six Blue Apron meals so far centered around pasta + zucchini, we are looking forward to some new ingredients in the next couple recipes – even if they do include kale.

One of the elements of cooking that I’ve struggled with is that there’s been no good time, place, space, etc. where I can integrate shopping into my daily life. For many years, there was a grocery store that was on my path from work to home – at one point, literally across the street from the office I worked in – but that is not the case any longer. While there are a couple of specialty grocery stores within a 10 minute walk of my house – both a Trader Joe’s and a Whole Foods – the closest thing which is a “generic” grocery store really isn’t within walking distance, and certainly not on my way home.

3 weeks in, and I’m still at it!

So far, I’ve been sticking to my initial plan: Cooking my two Blue Apron meals every week. I’ve made Fettuccine and Tuscan-Spiced Cod, chicken and curry. I even cooked one dish that wasn’t a Blue Apron meal, prepping a pot roast in a slow cooker on Memorial Day!

I did it. I cooked!

My first Blue Apron box arrived this week, starting me on my road towards integrating cooking into my daily life.

As evidence of my lack of kitchen investment, I present to you an example: The sink. Ever since we moved, our sink has not worked reliably. Specifically, we have a sink with a sprayer nozzle, and the sprayer nozzle had cracked, so you’d get a weird pulsing effect in the water coming out of the sink: first water would come out of the faucet, then out of the crack in the sprayer nozzle, then out of the faucet, etc....

I’m going to start getting into cooking with Blue Apron.

The key thing that I need to do to get into cooking is to get in the habit of cooking. That is, the point of the experiencing isn’t to create the perfect meal every night: It’s to start cooking anything.

I need to learn to cook. But I don’t think I mean that in the same way that other people mean it. Sometimes people say “I need to learn to cook” and mean something about creating recipes, or creating dishes straight out of their own minds. Or sometimes they say that as a way of saying “I need to learn to cook on a tight budget”, or make food out of their existing pantry goods, or food that meets their dietary needs, or other things like that....