Can you remember the dish you made yourself that made you go "ah! I love to make food that I want for myself!!" For me I think it was when I really learned to season and salt vegetables to make them taste good, instead of extremely boring or bad.
for a number of reasons I won’t get into for now I don’t do a lot of cooking and when I do it is probably motivated by a sort of base need to feed myself combined with a vague idea of the kinds of things one “should” eat. I have, however, developed a habit in the last ~18 months of making breakfast tacos and I was doing it reliably 5-6 days a week for a large part of 2023! I love tacos (bold internet opinion I know) but I think some of the things I really like about this ritual are:
- it makes me feed myself in the morning, which I understand to be “good for you” and also which I was not great at for the first 30-mumble years of my life
- it’s honestly pretty simple. The baseline version of it is that I put some fat and some onions and peppers into a pan, I beat some eggs, I pour them into the pan, I stir it around a little bit, I take it out of the pan, then I warm some tortillas in the pan (which also cleans up anything left in the pan), then I combine it. I am not “a morning person” but even I rarely mess this up.
- it’s SO simple that I can do it while listening to music, making coffee, and talking to my partner about the day if she hasn’t left for work already.
- I can adapt it so easily! I add different kinds of hot sauce, a food I really like, and get to think about how different sauces affect the taste. I frequently mash up an avocado and put some spices in there and spread that really nicely on my tortillas before I dish up the rest. I can crack an extra egg and heat some more tortillas and feed my partner if she hasn’t eaten yet. I can microwave some beans, buy some soyrizo one week, add some pickled onions, or any number of other changes to mix it up without learning a whole new dish.