The perfect cooking routine (according to impossible standards)
Why is food so hard.
There is probably at least one day within the week, that you think to yourself, “I wish I had the time, energy or inclination to cook healthy well-balanced meals for myself/and my family”.
Right? I’m surely not alone in wishing for this.
If you work full-time, have any dependents and even an inkling of a social life, it can seem impossible to engage in making well-balanced meals, full of vegetables, herbs and any other proteins, vitamins, minerals, etc that our modern diet greatly lacks.
For fun, I thought we’d spend a day in the life of the disembodied person who haunts my ‘perfect routine’ posts; creepily speaking for them in the second person, as they live out their entirely faultless life (I’m totally poking fun here, but secretly I think they might be exactly what I’m striving for during my time on this earth; a destination I never expect to reach).
Your perfect cooking routine
You wake up bright and early on a Sunday morning. It’s a beautiful, sunny day outside. You can hear birds singing – the warble of a magpie, the early morning song of a blackbird.
You love Sunday mornings. They’re your favourite time of the week. And you have big plans for today.
You’re going grocery shopping.
To hell with ordering groceries online, or signing up for the CSA box of your local urban farm! Food shopping for you, is an entirely sensory experience.
You want to pick the ripest fruit, the brightest vegetables. To paw through the dips and spreads available at your local bougie deli. To decide whether you feel like oat milk, almond milk or perhaps even full cream milk this week. To cycle home, your bike and backpack laded down with the spoils of your success, the wind streaming through your hair. You don’t wear a helmet; it’d cramp your style.
Online shopping is soulless. Food shopping in the flesh, is an adventure.
You leap out of bed and begin your morning routine. Then, you take a steaming cup of green tea to your kitchen table. Lovingly crafted by a local carpenter from the wood of a fallen tree within a forest just outside the city, it can seat ten souls – the perfect size for entertaining.
Your cookbooks are aligned along a purpose-built shelf in your kitchen. You select a couple of your favourites, sit down and begin to leaf through them. What should you cook this week? You do feel like a challenge, but you also like to select a couple of time-honoured favourites – a signature dish, if you will. You pick a few recipes, carefully marking the pages with a post-it note, so you can refer to them later on in the day, when the actual cooking begins. You leave the cookbooks stacked upon your otherwise clutter-free table.
It’s time to leave the house. You ditch your phone for the outing, opting for a bit of disconnection. Instead, you’ve used the back of an old receipt to painstakingly write down not only the ingredients you need, but the exact quantities you require. No food waste for you today! You gotta do your bit to help the planet, after all.
As such, you leap onto your bicycle, with its wicker basket fitted snugly in front and crate basket bolted to the back. A generous-sized backpack is slung over your shoulder. You’re an expert at getting everything home in one piece.
You sail down to the local farmers’ market, held in your suburb every Sunday. You’re early and so, one of the first in. You breeze through, picking up freshly baked bread, loading up on organic vegetables, fruit and eggs, and grabbing specialty butter, cream and cheese, made at a dairy farm an hour out of the city. You pause in front of the cake stall then, decided, load up on an apple and rhubarb pie. While your recipe is particularly good, it is nice to sometimes leave the effort to other people.
You jet on to your neighbourhood grocery store for anything else you couldn’t get at the farmers’ market. No Coles or Woolies for you – you keep things small and local. You gotta support the independents!
You order a coffee in your reusable cup, then spend some time staring contemplatively at the bright bunches of flowers at the nearby florist. Decided, you buy the blooms. Tulip season doesn’t last forever, after all.
You pedal your way home. Carefully unloading the groceries, you put your bike back in your dedicated bike rack, before transferring the perishables to the fridge and everything else to the pantry. A place for everything and everything in its place!
The tulips are artfully arranged in your favourite vase, on your beautiful dining table. A tasteful touch.
Before you begin, you throw together the freshest ingredients, creating a delicious salad for lunch, while brewing another cup of tea. You eat your meal, staring through the window at the world outside, mindlessly chewing.
And now. It’s time to get cooking! You fasten your favourite novelty apron securely around your waist and slide your way over to your music corner. Yes, your house has a music corner. It’s where you keep your record player, vinyls and the guitar that you’re probably going to learn how to play, someday. Maybe.
Mood music is selected. You like listening to vinyl while you work with your hands. It helps you tune into the task at hand.
You place your first cookbook in your dedicated cookbook holder and get cracking. You put together a collection of delicious lunches; a hearty soup, a tasty salad, a filling stir-fry, rich in flavour. Handmade granola is slowly roasted in your double oven, to be enjoyed for breakfast with yoghurt and fresh fruit. A generously-sized oven was something you desperately wanted in your own home. It was the thing you just had to have. Along with a dishwasher. And a garden. And a big bathtub.
You like to make dinner from scratch every day, if you can. It’s late autumn; a chill is in the air, so tonight you have opted for a full Sunday roast. You prep the chook, rubbing in a generous amount of cold-pressed organic extra virgin olive oil and sea salt, to ensure the crispiest skin. Seasonal vegetables are arranged in your Le Creuset dish, to slowly roast. While you wait for the food to cook, you clean your kitchen – it’s fairly spick and span in any case, but a quick wipe down works wonders.
You set the table with placemats, wine glasses and matching plates, carefully laying out the pieces of your new and very expensive cutlery set alongside them. You light long tapered beeswax candles, set in matching holders, for a little bit of ambience. You serve up the food and pour a generous amount of perfectly chilled pinot gris into the glasses. It’s been a big and productive day. You’ve earned it.
The meal is eaten, enjoyed. You present the apple and rhubarb pie for dessert. Compliments are paid to the chef. No one needs to know you didn’t actually make it.
The table is cleared. The dishes are cleaned and then hand-dried or placed in the dishwasher (you’re very particular about this order of doing things), which now hums gentle in the background. You pop the cookbooks back on their dedicated shelf.
You survey your kitchen and sigh happily. Full. Content. And as the end of the weekend draws near, you begin your evening routine.
Ah. It’s a fun, fantasy place to escape to, while the real world feels like it’s falling apart.
Thanks for reading and good luck in cultivating your own perfect cooking routine.
I’ll meet you here next week. Same time and same place.
’Til then, stay well and well-fed.
-Celine
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Hopefully it is clear that this is a satirical post and none of this content is intended to be taken as actual advice on how to live your life.
Such an enjoyable read! Doesn't resemble my life one bit, but you took me there!