Happy Friday!
I’m Mike Murphy, Quartz’s technology editor, coming to you from the wonderfully frigid New York City to talk about falling in love with cooking somewhat later in life.
I used to order on Seamless four to five nights a week, usually going out the other two. I enjoyed cooking occasionally when I was growing up, mainly because I had such amazing cooks at home in my mom and sister, but I never really felt much need to cook for myself when I struck out on my own. New York could be my chef!
But that changed at the start of the year when I moved in with my girlfriend. I felt like I had a reason, as flimsy as it was, to cook now—to impress someone who already had decided she liked me enough to move in with me.
We both travel and attend a lot of events in the evening, but whenever we’re both home, I try to cook now. The act quickly morphed from something I did to show I was not useless at home into something I actively enjoyed doing, spending far too long looking up recipes we’d both like.
How to get yourself to cook. Changing habits is always difficult, and cooking was no different for me. I started with simple dishes, and made sure I had time to prepare them. I was also lucky to have a patient partner who didn’t mind eating dinner at 9pm when I didn’t read the recipe closely enough. I watched cooking shows and read a few things—I’m especially fond of the clear, concise and frankly un-patronizing work that Bon Appétit’s Basically produces—to learn how to make cooking simpler. I learned quickly that things will move slower than the recipe says. I learned to do things like cut all my vegetables before I started cooking.
My mom also gave me a very simple but extremely helpful piece of advice: Put out every ingredient in the recipe in front of you before you start cooking (I have since learned there’s a French term for this: mise en place). It’s the easiest way not to forget anything, and to see if you need anything else. I went a step further and try to put everything in chronological order of the recipe, but I don’t think anyone else needs to be that fussy.
Cooking also allows you to be as creative as you want, and is generally forgiving of mistakes. Unlike baking, where just adding too much water can turn your dough into batter, there’s generally wiggle room in savory dish recipes. I started out dutifully following recipes, like edible paint-by-numbers exercises, but soon found myself adding a little more garlic, a few extra dashes of chili flakes, and then, eventually, looking at a recipe and deciding to only follow the general spirit of the recipe, making much of it up as I went along.
After every meal I cook, I send my mom and sister a photo. That small act helps me feel like I’ve completed a task, and the kind words they usually send back also help. I’ve now been drafted in to help with this year’s Thanksgiving dinner—in years past, I was usually just the dishwasher or cocktail maker.
A few small hacks. Cooking still takes time, and I’m still learning the best ways to get things done as quickly or simply as possible. A few friends have suggested things that have really helped along the way though:
- Buy a good knife. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but a proper chef’s knife—that you keep sharp—goes a long way to speeding up prep work. I bought this one, and it’s great, though it seems to have gone up in price.
- Get a food processor. You can do so many things with one. I use it to blend sauces and dips, but also to slice or grate vegetables that I just can’t cut as accurately by hand. This one really does the trick.
- Slow cook when you want to free up your days. Weekends when I’m home, I buy a slab of meat, whip up a marinade, and drop it in this surprisingly affordable and excellent slow cooker.
- Store your recipes. I don’t love the New York Times’s cooking app for its content—not every dish needs to be elevated to the haughty standards of Pete Wells—but it does have a few great recipes, and it’s an excellent place to store ones you find around the web. I have the iPad and iPhone app installed, so I can just press the little share icon on a recipe’s webpage and pop it into the NYT app for later.
- Pace yourself. Don’t start out thinking you’re going to be cooking a week’s worth of food in one go. Shop when you’re in the mood to cook—I usually pick up whatever I need on the way home from work—and go from there.
Track your progress. Kind of like going to the gym, it’s easier to keep yourself motivated if you track how much better you’ve gotten over time. I’ve moved on from just messaging my family to letting the entire internet know. I recently started an Instagram account for all the chicken recipes I make for my girlfriend and me (she doesn’t eat red meat, I don’t like fish, so chicken it is!), and that very public act of showing I’m doing the cooking has inspired me to do better. I also found that having a theme, while seemingly limiting, has actually forced me to be more creative than I would have been. (And it turns out there are even entire cookbooks dedicated just to chicken! )
Find solace. I’ve actually taken up two new passions this year, cooking and golf. I’d done them both before here and there, but I somehow found the space and time to partake in them properly for the first time this year. They stir up something similar in me, where I have to expend a lot of mental energy to produce something that’s supposed to look natural and easy. It probably doesn’t help that I’m not very good at either, but what I’ve come to realize—especially with cooking—is they help me focus on something productive outside of work.
The anxieties and stresses of daily life are put on the back-burner as you try not to slice your finger off when Julienning carrots or dicing garlic. You can think of little else than the pots in front of you when you have four things cooking that need to be stirred, seasoned, deglazed, and served, all without burning the house down. Somehow I’ve found peace in the frenetic pace of cooking.
Hopefully you have, or can, too.
Have a great weekend.
Today, you can hear new music from the poet and singer Leonard Cohen, who passed away in 2016. He finished his last album, You Want It Darker, just weeks before he died. His son, Adam, has spent a large chunk of the last three years filling out an additional eight songs Cohen recorded along with his last album. But don’t think of them as B-sides: “Had we had more time and had he been more robust, we would have gotten to them,” Adam told The New York Times. The new record, Thanks for the Dance, features guest artists including Beck, Damien Rice, and Feist. Hallelujah.