Everybody needs to relax about weeknight cooking. You, me—everybody. I know, I know—we’re stressed out, and we work too hard, and none of us want cooking dinner to add to that work and stress. But the demands we make of our weeknight recipes—Be simple! Be fast!—aren’t helping.
Because Tuesday night dinner is not dental work. It’s not a tax audit. It’s nothing we need to rush through as fast as possible just to get it over with. But as long as that’s the mindset we’re in about weeknight cooking, then sure, yeah, it’s going to be something to dread.
COOK90 is the time to reset that thinking. We’re leaning in to cooking, not out, so let’s use this moment to accept a simple reality: Sometimes Tuesday night dinner is going to take 15 minutes, and sometimes it’s going to take an hour.
This balance of longer cooking and shorter cooking makes weeknight cooking manageable. You see this in almost every nextover: the first night is a bigger lift, which makes the second night a smaller one.
I can hear you still protesting: Why not just make every weeknight meal simple and quick? If that’s really what you want, cool. But I think that if we’re truly interested in stress-free cooking, we have to mix it up. Because while the quick meals may not add stress to our days, it’s the longer ones that have the potential to actually take stress away.
Buckle up while I tell a personal story: I wrote this book on nights and weekends, and there were many nights when I stayed at work until 7 p.m., took the subway to the grocery store, hiked those groceries home, and finally started testing a recipe at 9 p.m. I’d be beyond stressed: Flipping on the stove angrily, slicing the onion with spite, and taking out a lot of aggression on my salad spinner.
But a few minutes into cooking, something always changed. When I got into the rhythm of slicing mushrooms, I started to breathe. The sound and smell of onions hitting hot oil distracted me from my bad mood. All the physical, sensory, sometimes even meditative acts of cooking shifted my focus and slowed my thoughts, and by the time dinner was ready I was in a much better place than I was when I started.
I’m not saying this will always happen to you, and in fact, maybe this will never happen to you (different strokes!). And I’m definitely not saying that simple and quick isn’t valuable—it’s not like I’m roasting chickens every night over here. But I am saying that if you think of weeknight cooking as a chore, well, that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Don’t worry: This chapter has plenty of fast meals in it, many of which were developed by Epi’s test kitchen as alternatives to take-out. They’re healthier than delivery, they taste better, and yes, they’re faster, too. But if you can start seeing dinner as a valuable, enjoyable use of your time, it doesn’t matter if it takes you 20 minutes or 55—it will feel like it took no time at all.