I’m the most incapable cook on the planet. Food has never been much of an interest to me so I still struggle at even the most basic kitchen-based tasks like boiling pasta or frying eggs can end in catastrophe.
And yet I love cooking.
Not to the point where I spend hours a day doing it – surely not – but after home cooking a few simple meals repeatedly for the past few months I find fulfillment when throwing even the most mundane assortments of food together.
Since reading The Primal Blueprint I’ve been fairly keen to be conscious of the food that goes into my body, and make some much needed changes to my diet. It’s still a long journey until I’ll feel content with what I’m eating (and I’ll be writing about this a lot more), but one of the most important steps to take is to cook your own meals. This allows you to:
- Be conscious of what you’re eating
- Flex your creativity to boost your caloric intake
- Tailor the taste to your preferences
- Induce hunger through the smell of preparing food
- Define your own serving sizes
But I get that cooking doesn’t sound particularly fun to a lot of people – especially us skinny guys who aren’t too interested in eating as it is. You can learn to love it though, and although that belief is far too overarching to tackle completely in a single article, there are a few simple things you can do to learn to love cooking:
- Find the rhythm. There is a rhythm in cooking that comes with practice. At first you may flail your arms around and crack eggs without any precision, but as time goes on the process of preparing your own meal almost becomes like its own dance. You begin to adopt the most efficient ways of performing certain tasks, and suddenly cooking your meal transforms from an uncoordinated mess to a fluid sight to behold.
- Play with it and have fun. One of the most common meals I cook for myself is a mighty fine beef burger. It’s pack with calories, tastes great, and is just a great meal overall. It can get a tad boring at times though, preparing the same food over and over. That’s why I like to play with it at times, trying to bump up the contents of the burger by adding a couple of fried eggs to the mix, or whatever tickles my fancy.
- Work with proper tools. For the longest time I used an old frying pan that wouldn’t clean probably, had lost all its non-stick properties, and had warped slightly, making my burgers cook unevenly. Picking up a new pan (after months of just putting up with it) immediately made cooking more enjoyable, allowing me to focus on creating a work of food-art, rather than simply trying to prevent a ton of things from going wrong.
It’s not common to see a skinny chef, but there’s no reason you can’t choose to break the stereotype. Put on an apron (okay, you don’t really have to) and start playing around with nature’s edible gifts.
