"Can't Cook, Won't Cook"

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In short, I scavenged like a raccoon. I wrote cooking off as “not my thing” alongside, say, basketball. And I am not alone. According to a 2014 YouGov survey of 10,000 Britons, one of the largest ever conducted about food, 10% of us cannot cook a thing – equating to 5 million people. A smaller survey in 2018 found that 25% of respondents could only make three dishes (including boiled egg and soldiers, and porridge).

I had accepted my limitations in the kitchen – then, last year, something changed. Now, after just a few mental shifts, I would go so far as to say that I am pretty good at cooking. No one is more surprised than me, except maybe friends who I have cooked for. For most people, the below will be obvious. For the raccoons: read on. Investigate your resistance It is through this freestyling that you start to develop your own instincts, says Guardian writer Felicity Cloake. “My advice is to concentrate on a handful of dishes you know you like until you can make them well, and gradually adapt them to make them your own.” Part of scaling up in the kitchen, Johansen suggests, is finding “like-minded” people to cook for, who are less concerned about what’s on the menu than enjoying each other’s company. “People are generally very grateful to be fed,” she says. Part of the reason I have been able to go so long without knowing how to cook is that for several years I lived with a friend who enjoyed taking charge in the kitchen. He made dinner; I did the dishes – everyone was happy. But it also made me complacent.Once you start to see results, that’s when the magic happens, even if it’s something really simple like scrambling eggs,” says Johansen. Find a source you trust Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 2 January 1996". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020. Indeed, for the beginner, even the easiest recipes are full of subjective or unclear language, such as “desired consistency”. It was by paying attention that I learned what corners I could and couldn’t cut. For example: it’s important that aubergines are “very finely” sliced, but you can usually fudge onions – and always save the pasta water. Resist the leftovers trap

I think we always underestimate our capacity for change,” says Signe Johansen, author of Solo: The Joy of Cooking for One. “But it is life-affirming to think: ‘I’m capable of adapting and evolving.’” Raise the stakes Seeing my staples, when I look in the fridge or cupboard, means I feel more capable and inspired – and I would not have known what they were had I not been forced to find out.Iyer tells me that she developed the traybake concept when her own enthusiasm for cooking was at an all-time low, after a bad breakup. “The effort bar was supposed to be: if you can tear the film off a ready meal, you can probably chop some sweet potato and put it in a tin.” James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes that behaviour change starts with identity change. To create new habits, “you need to start believing new things about yourself”. Practising my cooking felt a bit like practising my French with a native speaker who is also fluent in English: insisting on imposing my incompetence on others, at the expense of everyone’s enjoyment. More important is maintaining a rhythm. Where I used to cook once and eat it night after night, I now freeze the other portions or add an element I’ve made from scratch, so as not to break my cooking streak. Self-help guru and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss surveyed more than 100,000 of his (mostly male) Facebook fans to discover what turned them off cooking and found an array of reasons: too many ingredients or tools, intimidating skills, different dishes finishing at different times, standing at the stove, food waste.

Iyer, who describes herself as “not really a leftovers gal”, looks for ways to make them into a different meal – for instance, by turning odds and ends into a rissole.Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 2 September 1996". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020. Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 4 June 1997". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020. See if you can identify the source of your belief that you are someone who can’t cook. You might uncover a false assumption – for example, that you don’t deserve to enjoy food, that any time not spent working is wasted, or that cooking is anti-intellectual or even women’s work. With attitudes to food shaped in childhood, these retrograde ideas can be insidious. The novelist Hanya Yanagihara recently said that she “deliberately never learned” to cook as a teenager for fear of being trapped in the domestic sphere; I suspect my own historical resistance was similar. But it is exhilarating to realise that your identity is not fixed. Start by deciding that you can cook, “then prove it to yourself with small wins”, writes Clear.