Cooking doesn’t begin in the kitchen. It begins at the grocery store, the butcher shop, and the farmers’ market. And it begins even before that. You need to know why you’re shopping, and hopefully even know exactly what you’re shopping for. So you could say cooking begins with your grocery list.
But wait—cooking also starts when a recipe pops up in your Facebook feed and you make a mental note to try it. And it starts when you spring-clean your kitchen and in a rush of self-reliance stock it with dry beans, pasta, tins of tuna, and coconut milk. And when you cook daily, cooking starts at the moment your last meal ends, when you wrap up the leftovers and stick them in the fridge to repurpose tomorrow.
In other words, cooking is starting all the time; cooking is a cycle on a never-ending loop. Recipes turn into shopping lists; a steak and broccoli dinner turns into tomorrow’s soba noodle lunch. The cooking cycle is seamless, because each moment naturally flows into the next. But if one part of the cycle is skipped or ignored, the process starts to break down. And that’s when cooking starts to feel stressful, difficult, even impossible.
COOK90 turns the cooking cycle into a plan. The Four-Point Plan for Cooking Every Day takes the amorphous, fluid cooking cycle and breaks it down into actionable, achievable steps:
1. Write a smart meal plan.
2. Make a big weekly shop.
3. Build (and use) a Speed Pantry.
4. Cook with nextovers (which, as you’ll see, is a more intentional kind of leftover).
It’s less rigid than it looks. Anybody who cooks regularly follows these steps to some degree; some might even do it subconsciously. So why are we so intentional about it during COOK90? Think of it as rehearsal: Sticking to the plan week after week familiarizes you with each step. Before you know it, you know the moves by heart.