I appear to have been wrong, yesterday, in saying my next post would be all about kitchen items I regret buying. Of course, I was also expecting not to have another post until Wednesday; a post which is already scheduled to go up, so I guess I should just accept occasional wrongness. Or call this a bonus post.

BONUS POST! WOO!

I’d like to share Tracie McMillan’s article called “Cooking isn’t fun, but you should do it anyway”. It hit Slate yesterday, so I figured I might as well slip this link in today and then go back to regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow.

Frankly, I really appreciate this essay. I considered simply tweeting about it, but I wanted to get into how great this essay is. Because, frankly, it’s great.

The truth is, cooking sometimes sucks. Hell, it’s such a struggle for me that I’ve had to ask for help in figuring out lunch at least once, and I suspect more than once.

It sucks even more when, unlike me, you can’t fall back on copious meals at your favorite pub or from a delivery service. When you really, really have to worry about if you create something inedible.

I haven’t really ever thought about that before, I have to be honest. I’ve fallen into a lot of the thinking assumptions McMillan highlights in her article. Particularly the first myth she mentions, that the poor don’t cook. I imagine I’ve fallen into that assumption because I, apparently like everyone else, tend to think of Bill and I as being solidly middle-middle class, economically speaking. So, when I see people who I think/know are substantially less well-off, financially, eating at restaurants, eating take-out or convenience foods at similar or greater rates that Bill and I do? Well, it’s easy to make assumptions that are based on other assumptions. Namely, what if not only are we middle class, but higher than I think, and they are also middle class? And we’re all eating out more than we should be?

If nothing else, McMillan’s article is a good reminder that my eating in challenge is a good thing to keep trying at, until it becomes a habit. It’s a good reminder that my meals should probably look more like the above photo than the below.

And it’s a good reminder to be honest. To say, truthfully, that sometimes cooking is a damn chore. That for every night like Sunday night, when we had company and laughter and I got to show off my cooking skills by cooking during a power outage, there will be a night where all I want to do is say, “I don’t even care that our CSA was delivered yesterday and we have a full freezer of food. I don’t want to cook.” And then, do it anyway.

That’s gonna be the real challenge. I hope we’re up to it.