The Knotty Matter of No Longer Cooking with Gas

Dear Tamar:

My next writing project has an awful lot to do with food. I have been cooking and writing, writing about cooking, and cooking for my writing for a couple years, and I'm all out of gas. I usually find joy in the kitchen. But I am suffering from what a therapist called "food fatigue." Symptoms include not wanting to cook for, shop for, prep, or even think about food. I do want to eat food though! I do get hungry! I just want someone else to narrow down my choices to "this or that." I have been managing my dilemma with take-out and accepting dinner invitations. Ordering whatever takeout I don't have to think too much about is dull but fine. Do you have any other solutions I might consider? Please help me find my kitchen mojo again!

-No Longer Cooking with Gas

Dear No Longer Cooking with Gas,

A month ago I spoke at the D&H Canal Historical Society. During the comment session, a man offered that he preserved his love of cooking for his family by cooking only when he wanted to. He was adamant: If the spirit didn’t move him to light a burner, he would drive to his local coop—which he insisted had a formidable, high-quality, organic hot bar—and serve the coop’s versions of family’s favorites until his muse awoke, which it reliably did.

There is—as one of my English professors used to say—“a lot to unpack here.” Generally speaking, the male of our species feels less beholden to cooking as part of its identity—locating it (again: generally) closer to the category of hobby than duty. Also, the man could afford to regularly buy prepared organic food from his coop. This is no mean feat: one dinner of coop rotisserie chicken, coop wheat-berries, coop Thai noodles, and coop garlic broccoli can cost what many families can spend in a week. Also, he was unfazed by the packaging his awaiting of the muse incurred.

Now that that is unpacked and strewn about, I posit that there is something to his strategy. The waiting man maintains Buddhist faith that inspiration will visit him, and that whatever he and his family eat in the meantime is part of the grand plan, the cosmos’s cookery. What I admire about his process is the absence of angst. Whatever privilege his plan requires, it avoids stress, which has an unarguable chilling effect on inspiration or interest or the appearance of the muse.

The omission of angst is the only point on which the man and my strategies for approaching the subject of your letter—culinary languor—agree. Otherwise, I practice and advise the opposite. My method is not to settle under the Bodhi tree. It is to stride in an unhurried fashion past the whole grove—to take as a given that the simplest cooking, which requires no inspiration, is adequate, and that while doing it, I will be moved. I will not be inspired, enlightened, or transformed—or I may not. But I will be moved enough to make a whole-hearted decision about when to pull pasta from its boiling water, flipping off the burner under scrambling eggs, buttering toast.

Having written that, I see a second point of overlap between the man and me. It is trust—or faith, or conviction, or belief. He believes if he doesn’t worry, he’ll want to cook again, and he will. I believe that the feeling of whole-heartedness, which I experience as a form of love, will urge me forward, sometimes only lightly, sometimes with passionate force. Light nudges are enough for me to produce simple meals, and I neither can afford, nor want, to serve prepared dinners in the meantime.

You asked how to rekindle your interest in choice. My first answer is that simple cooking may be your own economical Bodhi tree. After buttering toast, you may be seduced by the charms of fat and head to the fancy cheese shop for salted butter from Normandy. You may remember having made pasta with butter and lemon this time last year, as soon as the air warmed. You may stumble into interest by doing.

My second answer is to eat—not in an agitated way. Just with the same steadfastness as you turn ingredients from raw to cooked. Last Friday, my mother took us to dinner at Feast and Floret, where the crisp, golden chicken Milanese fills the plate. Feeling indifferent toward cooking myself, I found myself startled into caring by a bite of olive tapenade. I haven’t made olive tapenade in ages, and its oceanic brine shocked me. My mind rushed with images of torn burrata with tapenade spooned over it, of asparagus, freshly boiled, dolloped with tapenade…Two days later, I made a lunchtime salad of lettuces, walnuts, and Meredith Dairy marinated cheese, and found myself chewing a peppercorn in amazed delight. Had peppercorns always been so absorbing? Had I forgotten? Had I never taken time to notice? All I want is to cook with black peppercorns—cacio e pepe, chicken alla diavola, steak au poivre.

Dear cook, since you mention running out of gas, I’ll supply some straight motor-oil. My friend Nena makes a version of Tacodeli’s famed Salsa Doña that I find to be one of the most delicious and adaptable pleasures in my kitchen. If neither the man’s nor my advice feels useful, make Nena’s Salsa Doña and put it on everything you eat until it’s gone. I’m certain it will kindle many a figurative fire.

Salsa Doña

1 white onion, peeled and quartered

6-8 jalapeños

10 cloves garlic, peeled

5-6 tablespoons neutral oil

salt to taste

On a tray, broil the onion, jalapeños, and garlic cloves until charred, turning as needed. Add to a blender with a pinch of salt and the oil and blend to smooth. Taste for salt and adjust.

*For a less spicy version, remove some to all of the jalapeño seeds.