I tweeted this out last night, thinking about a specific experience I had cooking with some roommates of mine last year.
Whenever I move into a new place, or start a new era of my life, I make this strata. A strata is a bready, cheesy, eggy, casserole that you can throw in the oven for an hour. (This is the recipe I’ve made for years — I omit the aachar.) It’s a very hard dish to fuck up, it’s not very healthy for you, but it tastes like heaven — a perfect meal for a celebration. I put my younger 20-something roommates to work prepping the peppers and mushrooms, and was lightly surprised when they told me they didn’t know how to chop vegetables. I taught them how, it was a lovely afternoon that bled into a lovely evening, replete with plenty of wine and conversation.
The tweet was a joke, a light-hearted prod at folks who never learned some basic life skills. I didn’t expect it to go viral, but it went viral, and most people are taking it the right way. A few people well outside of my circles, who might not understand that I’m really not coming at anyone with any malice, took offense.
What about those with physical disabilities that limit their abilities in the kitchen, they ask? Well, this tweet wasn’t about them. It was about people who have the physical abilities to prep vegetables, but who haven’t bothered to learn in adulthood. But others were concerned about the applicability of my tweet to people who have psychological, not physical, limitations. What about those with ADHD, those with certain kinds of autism, those with depression and anxiety, who have problems processing information and with executive function and planning out tasks? What about the enormous amount of preparation and skill and practice it takes to cook from scratch, to make grocery shopping and regular cooking part of your lifestyle? (I mean I really was just joking about how some people don’t know how to chop a tomato properly — but point taken.)
I have an answer to at least some of that, I think.
A few years ago, I wrote an essay that I never managed to get placed in a publication. It was about how my practice of cooking informed and ran parallel to my recovery from mental illness. I think it might be relevant now, so I revived it, updated it slightly.
Here it is, I hope it’s useful to you.
There’s a pattern I follow, when I get depressed.
Slowly, I stop making food at home; no more cooking from scratch, no more using healthy ingredients. I stop eating well and become sedentary, so I put on weight. Wendy’s becomes more and more attractive to me, and I find myself there once or more a day, trying to fill the hole inside of me with fried chicken and ranch dressing. My spending on fast food skyrockets.
And there’s a pattern I follow when I work myself out of depression.
The twice-daily trips through the drive-thru cease, because I start cooking again. I start actively visiting the produce section of the grocery store, rather than making my usual quick stop through the frozen food section. I immerse myself in my kitchen, and revel in the amazing flavors I produce.
I have bipolar disorder. My life is characterized by periods of intense depression, relative normalcy, and intense mania. Part of living with this disorder is not knowing when my mood will change; my personality and habits with it. Learning to actively, purposively ride this wave — rather than letting it ride me — that is part of my treatment. I practice mindfulness by observing my recovery; by noting the ebbs and flows of my mood, by understanding and being compassionate to myself when I’m unable to perform as well as I’d like, by reinforcing and building on my skills when I find myself doing well.
I extend this mindful approach to my experiments in the kitchen. There are quite a lot of parallels to learning how to be a good cook and recovery, to fumbling around in the kitchen and fumbling around in life.
1. You’re going to mess up.
In cooking as in life, you are eventually going to produce something that is a complete and total disaster.
I wanted to experiment with mushrooms. It’s not an ingredient I traditionally gravitate towards, but I had just made a delicious kale-cheddar strata with cremini mushrooms, and decided to run with the flavor. A beef stroganoff seemed the perfect way to use up the steak I had just bought, along with the rest of my mushrooms.
Of course, the stroganoff was a disaster. I used regular, homemade yogurt to thicken the sauce, rather than the greek yogurt that was suggested (which was itself a poor substitution for sour cream, as I later learned). I was left with a watery, sour-tasting stroganoff with tough, flavorless chunks of beef; utterly unappetizing.
And then I cleaned my kitchen, threw out the failed experiment, and set up making the next recipe on my list. I moved the hell on. You can’t win every battle. The most you can do is learn lessons from the failed venture, and apply them to your next one.
It’s not a reflection on you and what a poor cook (or person) you are. It’s a sign that maybe you did something that wasn’t quite successful. The nice thing about actions is that they can be changed. Next time, I’ll be more careful with my substitutions. I’ll cook the beef less. I might make more of an effort to show up on time for work, or submit a piece well in advance of the deadline.
Mistakes are not indelible personality traits; they are things that happen. Provided you learn from your past, no bad experience is really a failure.
2. “Waste” is an opportunity.
I could have forced myself to eat the failed stroganoff, of course — I know a lot of people are in the position where they can’t afford to throw out food that isn’t made to their liking — but truth is, it would have sat in my fridge until I would be forced to throw it out; moldy and stinking. The uneaten remains of failed kitchen experiments aside, there is so much waste in a kitchen. The remaining parsley that wilts and dies because turns out you only wanted a few sprigs as a garnish. The fruit you improperly stored in the freezer that now has freezer burn. The expired tofu. The leftovers that you can’t possibly eat all of, so they go bad. Yes, this is a problem that more experienced cooks experience less of, but they still experience it.
There is wastage in every kitchen: you are not alone.
And there is wastage in real life, too. I spent four months working with a therapist who was a bad fit. For some reason, it took me that long to realize that I needed a different approach than talk therapy; I needed skills-based work, I needed DBT. Those are wasted months. The year (yes, a year!) I spent on an incorrect medication which made me extremely manic; it was a wasted year for recovery. These were side roads that fate pushed me down, that ultimately distracted me from getting better. Every mentally ill person I know has a story like this. Hell, every sane person does too. We all have detours we take, we all have wasted time on unfruitful endeavors. Waste is a part of life, just as it is in cooking.
But the lovely thing about the waste, is that it’s not always a waste, when you look at it from another perspective. Each detour down the wrong path can actually be a useful lesson, if you let it be. That experience with that therapist I “wasted” four months with now informs how I talk to my current therapist. If I feel that we’re too chatty in our sessions, too conversational, too much me, not enough her — I reign myself in. I resist the urge to fill up the space of our sessions with my conversation, and rather let her direct the conversation. And next time, when I make beef stroganoff, I might use sour cream, instead of yogurt, greek or otherwise.
Recovery is never a linear path upwards, there are dips, there are divots. Only by taking the detours, do you get to a place you want to be.
3. You have to work with what you have.
The true art of cooking isn’t in recreating a recipe perfectly; it is in making do with what you have in the fridge — throwing together something out of nothing, or at least, very little. It’s the ultimate test for the professional chefs on Chopped, as it is the challenge of everyone who needs to come up with something for a potluck but doesn’t have time to go to the grocery store.
And the thing is, knowing what you can go without, being able to predict how flavors combine together, instinctively understanding what a good substitute is — this is knowledge that only comes with experience in the kitchen. Knowing how to assemble a meal out of polenta, sauerkraut and pesto in twenty minutes is not unlike finding the wherewithal to cram for a final exam when your mental health reserves are running low — when you don’t have the resources to function at high capacity. Like it or not, you still have to pass the test. Still have to make an edible meal. And you’ll probably do better at both the more experience you have functioning with fewer resources.
4. You can’t control everything.
You can’t control whether or not the truck came and your grocery store has avocados. You can’t stop your roommate from eating the apples you were going to make a crisp with. You can’t control whether that new recipe you try is going to come out good or not. You can try your best to ensure that what comes out of that oven tastes decent, but ultimately, fate has control over your casserole. The trick to cooking is to roll with the unpredictability that is bound to be your life, to adapt quickly, to change your plans to suit new circumstances. A dish calls for fresh lime juice but all you have is bottled lemon juice — swallow your perfectionism, recognize that acidity is acidity, and venture forth. I promise you it will taste good, at the end of the day.
I treasure the elements I do have a sense of control over. These include my carefully curated pinterest recipe boards, my grocery store routine (start at dairy, work my way back to produce), and my weekly trips to the farmer’s market that are more about socializing than buying anything (that food is expensive!). But the rest of it is up to fate. I’m ultimately okay with that. If I skip a day in the bullet journal because it’s been too hectic to write anything down, that’s life. If I don’t make all the errands I wanted to run in one day, oh well. We do what we can. The rest is in someone else’s hands.
5. You’re never going to stop learning.
Even when I think I’ve reached a plateau in what I know, in what I think I can do, there’s always something more to learn.
When I started this essay, maybe five years ago, I had just gotten pretty decent at making stove-top Punjabi daals and masalas, the cuisine I had started to learn from my mother when I was a teenager. And now, I think I’ve just gotten good at cooking with meat. I was raised a vegetarian, and my parents’ house, to this day, has a strict no meat policy. (I’m not even allowed to bring home non-vegetarian leftovers to store in my dad’s fridge.) I wasn’t raised with pot-roasts and grilled chicken, I had to learn this skill as a newly-omnivorous adult.
A few years ago, I invested in a simple Lodge cast iron pan, and have since used it so much it is beginning to attain the smooth, seasoned surface that all cast iron aficionados covet. I’ve learned the value of cooking a slab of meat on a surface that can heat evenly, that reliably retains heat. I understand now, how to not dry out meat while cooking it, how to imbue it with the most flavor from the marinade. I can comfortably use a meat thermometer now, whereas before they just intimidated me.
I haven’t experienced a sustained period of depression in about a year and a half. I don’t expect depression to visit me again the way it did regularly in my twenties. But as the depression has receded, a new problem has resurfaced — much more sustained, more frequent periods of mania. Has it been frustrating to enter my thirties with a whole new problem to tackle? Yes. I assume that in my forties, I’ll have a new set of challenges to overcome. Maybe I’ll decide to get really into baking then, too.
Life is change, and so is recovery. If you’re at a plateau, if things are stable, know that something is about to come to mess all that stability up. It’s up to you to approach the change with a curious and endlessly inquisitive attitude — whether you open yourself up to the possibilities the universe throws at you will determine whether you’ll learn the lesson you’re supposed to learn, or not.
6. You gotta enjoy yourself!
If you’re a cook, you know how exhilarating it is, waiting for your enchiladas to come out of the oven, imagining what they’re going to taste like. Eating them is even better. When you raid your leftovers for lunch, it’s satisfying to know that whatever you’re about to eat will taste better than the fast food crap you were going to eat. And nothing compares to the feeling of having your friends over to enjoy what you created, knowing that you’ve made a great meal.
Cooking is a lot of work. So is everything else. Life is full of phone calls that have to be made, of hard conversations, of painful confrontations, of things that are anxiety-inducing or boring or difficult. But it’s important to go through them. No great meal can be created without a fair amount of chopping and cleaning and prepping, and no great experience can be enjoyed without a fair amount of work.
But when you get through the muck; when you power through the pain — that’s when it all becomes worth it.
Take a moment to savor it, to enjoy the wins. You’re going to need them for the next time you cook.
I’m not back yet, on this thing.
As some of you know, in late 2020, my mental health disintegrated. By March of 2021, I was hospitalized. I stayed there for a month, essentially rebooting my system after a series of personal and professional crises. But if you’ve been paying attention to the limited glimpse I give you of my life on my main social media feeds, you might also know that things have really gotten much better for me, psychologically, personally, and professionally.
A lot of good things have happened.
My relationship with my partner ended as we decided we’d be better as friends — that turned out to be a good thing, albeit a slightly sad development. I went back to work, doing things that were entirely different from the work I was doing. I started out back in restaurants, like I did before I became a working journalist. Then I decided to work for an after-school program here the Albany region. My motivation was to find something to do that was completely different, something I’ve never done before in my life, and try to learn something from the experience — and learn I did. I have never had a more rewarding job in my life, than working with those kids.
However, childcare famously doesn’t pay well, and after I got COVID this year and had was income-less for eight straight days (I was and am fine, touch wood), I resolved to get a better job. I found one. I’m currently working a 9-5, complete with benefits, PTO, a retirement account, and a decent work-life balance. To top all that off, my daily writing practice has creaked back to life, and I’ve decided that even if I’m not meant to be a reporter, I always was and always will be a writer.
My plan is to sporadically release new essays and interviews as I find time, as I settle into my new job. By the summer, I want to commit to a new regular publishing schedule, and by this time next year, I’d like to re-monetize and offer paywalled extras on an at least monthly basis. Those of you who purchased year subscriptions will be able to re-activate your subscriptions at no cost.
I am uneasy being back on Substack after the way this company has treated the trans people harassed and doxxed by prominent users like Graham Linehan. I intended on migrating to another platform, but there don’t seem to be any competitors I can use, at the moment. As soon as I feasibly can, I’ll find a way to get off Substack for good.
Thank you so much for your support and love while I was offline. Thank you so much for your support going forward.
It’s been a minute since you posted anything here, I figured you’d moved on!
That was a lovely article, and I am very glad to hear you are doing better than you were.