Never Cook at Home
Trust me, I know it's a drag.
By Deb Perelman
Ms. Perelman runs the cooking blog Smitten Kitchen.

The New York Times
Aug. 25, 2018

I am a home cook in New York City. I have shared more than 1,400 recipes
on my website, Smitten Kitchen, and I've written two cookbooks. I am the
kind of insufferable person who squeals when the first tomatoes of the
season show up at the farmers' market and I post about them on Instagram
with abandon.

But there are many good reasons to never cook at home. I know because I
bail regularly.

First of all, those tomatoes are often staggeringly expensive, as they
should be. Farming is brutally hard work. And the results are highly
unpredictable, I've found in my few failed stints as a Gentlewoman
Balcony Farmer.

In a city where rents have never been higher, groceries also cost huge
chunks of money. As long you can buy five dumplings in Chinatown for
$1.25 -- forever, I hope -- it's never going to be purely economical to
cook at home.

And what kind of monster wants to turn on an oven in August, anyway?
That wheezing window air-conditioner can only do so much. Did your
landlord find your grill on the fire escape and confiscate it, your only
way to cook without melting in your apartment?

Do you know what doesn't overheat an apartment in August?

A Popsicle for dinner.

It's also hard to cook dinner if work never ends. The extinction of a
9-to-5 workday has largely decimated whatever cushion of time one might
use to prepare a meal. And when we get home, we're more exhausted than
ever. Netflix, not a sink full of dishes, beckons.

Restaurant delivery is a glorious thing. Everything goes in the trash
chute and you have zero dishes to wash. (Unless you're the kind of
civilized person who transfers takeout to plates, in which case, warmly,
I believe you've brought these problems on yourself.)

Cooking, especially a new dish, is a huge gamble. Did the recipe author
forget that you don't have line cooks doing your prep? Was the ninth
ingredient in that recipe a confit you were supposed to have made weeks
ago? Do they chide you for not using the "best" butter? So many
potential pitfalls, all of which could be avoided by not participating.

Even good recipes lie. The yields are often bananas. The cooking times
are always dubious, too. A "20-minute recipe" seems to take me, on
average, about 75 minutes.

But everyone knows that cooking is really the least of the hurdles.
Creating a meal alone -- schlepping groceries, doing all the prep, all
the dishes, and being stuck with days of leftovers -- can feel like an
education in why you should definitely not do that again anytime soon.

Obstacles to cooking can come from inside the house, too. Any of the
spouses, partners or roommates we have invited into our lives can come
home any day and tell us that he or she has adopted a new diet and can
no longer eat whatever you just unpacked from the grocery store or love
the most.

Let's say you and this spouse or partner have worked out your
mixed-dietary relationship and decide to build a mixed-dietary family?
Adding more humans to your life means you will have to prepare food with
more urgency, thus eliminating the joy it brings you.

Maybe you have one of those types of kids who willingly eats kale. Enjoy
your good luck, but keep this to yourself. You've beaten the odds and
it's impolite to brag. Most parents are mired in a daily battle against
young people with untenable demands for a steady diet of macaroni and
cheese and halved grapes.

Also, sanctimonious cooks are annoying. You feed your children what?
Honestly, nothing makes me crave a bowl of cold cereal for dinner like
someone telling me the most important thing I can do for my kids'
health, IQ, the economy and even the earth they'll inherit is to cook
dinner every night.

We're in a time when there is such fandom, such fervor over cooking. But
those high-speed hands-and-pans videos only remind me of what a slow,
inefficient cook I am. Instagram pictures of flawlessly styled plates of
food make even my most successful attempts at home look flat.
Professional chefs show off elaborate recipes in cookbooks. Sometimes
the most sensible act of rebellion tastes like a bowl of popcorn.

I am supposed to say: You should cook anyway. Because it's the right
thing to do, we've been told ad infinitum. But I don't want to. There
are enough people lining up, eager to lecture or cast a side-eye at your
bowl of popcorn.

Here's why I cook:

I like the way that closely following a recipe can alleviate pressure
after a long day of having to make all the decisions.

I love how a dish that worked, or a meal that everyone liked, has the
power to change my day.

I like that pulling off a good meal when you least expect it is the
fastest way to feel victorious, even when real life does not.

I like the way that, even when I'm standing over the stove, cursing the
recipe writer who suggested that onions might caramelize in 10 minutes,
I'm totally absorbed. I'm not on group texts. I'm not following the
outrage of the moment on Twitter. I'm getting a brief, needed respite
and refuel from fretting over our democracy or forcibly separated
families or any of the other horrible things humans do to one another.

This thing -- focus, concentration, a goal and the reward of something
delicious I get to devour -- is so rare in my day-to-day life, I'll take
it when I can. And if someone wants to do the dishes or schlep the
groceries, or can give me their word that the recipe contains no
surprises, I might do it again tomorrow.

Deb Perelman is the author of, most recently, "Smitten Kitchen Every
Day: Triumphant & Unfussy New Favorites."