Wednesday, April 5, 2023

How to change how you feel about cooking and cleaning up.

 When did I internalize the message that cooking and cleaning up afterwards was some kind of arduous, time-consuming chore?  It takes vastly more time to drive to a restaurant than it does to put a sirloin in the broiler, and a bag of green beans in the microwave.

I come from a pretty eco conscious family.  At one point my dad decided that paper towels were the enemy, and switched his household to cloth towels.  He is probably right, but just purely as a crutch, having a roll of paper towels on hand makes the cleanup a lot easier than the specter of it I had been carrying around.


I wipe the plate into the garbage can, and I don't even have to clean the sink.  A dishwasher makes the final sanitization that much easier.


Some of the problems of low-carb dieting are only problems in the sense that we have an aversion to them:  In another post I talked about how I needed to learn to live with a reduced dynamic range of flavor in meals.  Whole foods being that much less exciting than chocolate chip pancakes.  In cleanup and cooking too, it's not really the time that it takes, or the arduousness of the process, but really just an aversion to it.


Flipping it on its head, if I look at cooking as a pleasure, as a rest activity from the cognitive and stress demands of the day, then it becomes something I look forward to.