![]() ![]() I will flick to another browser tab and forget to stir, or put a pan on a high heat then wander off. Self-help guru and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss surveyed more than 100,000 of his (mostly male) Facebook fans to discover what turned them off cooking and found an array of reasons: too many ingredients or tools, intimidating skills, different dishes finishing at different times, standing at the stove, food waste.īy addressing the one that is most off-putting to you, your wins will come easier.įor me, it’s my tendency to get distracted, especially if I am reading a recipe on my phone. It is the same for tools and equipment: I can’t be without a blender I don’t think my flatmate ever used one. ![]() Seeing my staples, when I look in the fridge or cupboard, means I feel more capable and inspired – and I would not have known what they were had I not been forced to find out. In setting up my own pantry, I quickly discovered that my flatmate’s essentials – pickled things, salty fish, hard cheeses, hot sauces – were completely different from mine.Īfter four months of living alone, I have learned that I cannot be without Greek yoghurt, kale, cannellini beans, peanut butter, sour cream, chilli flakes, spinach and frozen chapati breads. Unsurprisingly, my breakthrough with cooking came when I moved out to live by myself. Photograph: Crispin la valiente/Getty Images If the worst comes to the worst, you can buy them a takeaway. So if someone else handles the cooking in your household, ask them to take a week or two off, for the sake of your self-development. Practising my cooking felt a bit like practising my French with a native speaker who is also fluent in English: insisting on imposing my incompetence on others, at the expense of everyone’s enjoyment.īut muddling through one meal every couple of weeks is simply not enough to build momentum. ![]() (This happened anyway – “only three or four times”, he says.) And when I did cook, once every week or two, I did not dare deviate from the basics for fear of presenting him with an inedible dinner. When my flatmate went away, I lived on leftovers, knowing he would soon be back. He made dinner I did the dishes – everyone was happy. Part of the reason I have been able to go so long without knowing how to cook is that for several years I lived with a friend who enjoyed taking charge in the kitchen. “But it is life-affirming to think: ‘I’m capable of adapting and evolving.’” Raise the stakes “I think we always underestimate our capacity for change,” says Signe Johansen, author of Solo: The Joy of Cooking for One. Start by deciding that you can cook, “then prove it to yourself with small wins”, writes Clear. But it is exhilarating to realise that your identity is not fixed. The novelist Hanya Yanagihara recently said that she “deliberately never learned” to cook as a teenager for fear of being trapped in the domestic sphere I suspect my own historical resistance was similar. With attitudes to food shaped in childhood, these retrograde ideas can be insidious. You might uncover a false assumption – for example, that you don’t deserve to enjoy food, that any time not spent working is wasted, or that cooking is anti-intellectual or even women’s work. See if you can identify the source of your belief that you are someone who can’t cook. To create new habits, “you need to start believing new things about yourself”. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes that behaviour change starts with identity change. For most people, the below will be obvious. No one is more surprised than me, except maybe friends who I have cooked for. Now, after just a few mental shifts, I would go so far as to say that I am pretty good at cooking. ![]() I had accepted my limitations in the kitchen – then, last year, something changed. A smaller survey in 2018 found that 25% of respondents could only make three dishes (including boiled egg and soldiers, and porridge). And I am not alone.Īccording to a 2014 YouGov survey of 10,000 Britons, one of the largest ever conducted about food, 10% of us cannot cook a thing – equating to 5 million people. I wrote cooking off as “not my thing” alongside, say, basketball. ![]()
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