I’ve never liked cooking and home ec was my least favorite class in school, probably of all time. So I don’t make much of an effort, but every once in a while you want to do something more interesting or make an effort just for the sake of eating healthy. I’m very far from being one of those health crazed people and I couldn’t make myself eat for some long term goal. But after a decade of coincidental and unhealthy eating, I’m migrating towards eating in a way that promotes short term well being. I’m just not excited about food, so why not just eat whatever makes me feel good, right? While I haven’t exactly knocked out a firm diet for this yet, the idea is just to eat food that doesn’t get in the way of anything that I do. Obviously, overeating does that, large amounts of trash food does it too etc. I’d also like something that promotes good sleep, or I wouldn’t be writing this at 5.30 in the morning. The lack of good sleep is very annoying, but it might be more of a mental problem for all I know.

Anyway, back to making the occasional effort. What bugs me about recipes is that they have to be so complicated. Half the ingredients on the list I’ve never even seen in the store, I’ve no idea what they look like and it’s just a wild goose chase. A few years ago someone gave me cookbook of a 1000 Chinese recipes, and I tried a bunch of them. Hunting down the ingredients (after translating them from Polish) took a long time, and not really knowing what I was doing in the kitchen made some of those efforts come out weird. But there were some success stories as well. Still, doing one recipe was a big commitment, it took rigorous shopping and implementation of the recipe. It wasn’t exactly a lot of fun, even though the food was good in the end.

Now, I can understand that adding a quarter of a teaspoon of something slightly enhances the flavor, but they really make it hard to cook these dishes. Meanwhile, if you go simple and cut everything that seems like an accessory, it ends up tasting very… plain. Good thing my home ec teacher isn’t reading this (or is she?).