Some things about me & food

[kaberett]

... because I've ended up explaining them more'n once recently, so I am going to write them down! Content notes for references to disordered eating.

My relationship to cooking for myself (as opposed to cooking for others) is kind of messy on about three different fronts, which is some of why I so value having other people to feed. The issues are these: (1) I have a history of disordered eating [about which I can talk more if useful/of interest, but it is distinct from the two points that follow]; (2) I frequently just forget to eat, in that once I've been hungry for more than a relatively short period of time I stop parsing it as hunger/I stop feeling hungry and therefore don't have any direct incentive to do the energy outlay, and (3) unless I actually manage to consider the texture/flavour/etc interesting, I mostly don't think it's worth the effort - if eating isn't pleasant then I find it an actively offputting process so will just Not Get Around To It. Normally a sleep is enough to reset me if I've slipped into not-eating over the course of the day.

There is some stuff I will fairly reliably eat, in part related to texture-cravings. Cheap 'orrible two-cheese-and-onion sandwiches will work when it's hard to get me to eat anything else; sometimes I want smooth-texture, which is mostly set custard (as creme brulee or as trifle), and sometimes I want crunchy/spiky, which is mostly seaweed-peanut-rice crackers.

This is why (a) I frequently end up trying to find someone to cook dinner for, (b) you are actively doing me a favour if you let me cook for you, and (c) it is often fairly useless to attempt to arrange a meal schedule around how hungry I am.

Things!

Comments

[silveradept]

So you might find a parade of dinner guests to be a helpful thing here and there.

I'll bet you're a good cook, if cooking for others serves such a purpose as you mention here.

[kaberett]

RIGHT THAT WAS THE OTHER FOOD-RELATED STUFF I MEANT TO TALK ABOUT--

I grew up watching my mum & my Grossmutti cooking, and being taught bits and pieces of cooking by them, in the context of a culture where feeding people properly and making sure they take enough with them when setting off on trips etc was A Thing. When my baby brother rocked up and started eating solids I watched my mum adapt all her recipes to be dairy-free; and then when I told her age 11 that I wanted to go vegetarian, she said "as long as you cook for yourself". So I've been cooking vegetarian food for nearly fifteen years, and through secondary school I had a Food Technology teacher who thought that the eventual qualification was secondary to teaching us how to cook, and very gently shoved us into creativity well outside our comfort zones - each week the deal would be "next week you're going to cook something where the focal ingredient is potatoes, go" and we'd have the intervening time to compare recipes and come to a decision; or "we're going to make lemon curd/risotto/choux pastry, you get to pick the customisations", to teach us skills. It was epic.

... and this is why my attitude to cookbooks these days is that they're interesting to leaf through for ideas but by and large there's no point in me owning them (because what actually happens is that I cross-compare four or five recipes, choose the bits I think sound most interesting from each, then remember the shape and cook from that memory of the shape -- rather than from paper in front of me, with a few notable exceptions in the region of complicated cakes.

Folk who get fed by me seem to enjoy it, or at least they often come back for seconds and usually want to visit again. :-)

[silveradept]

Sounds like the same way my significant other cooks - can look at a recipe, hems a bit, then creates something like it but not exactly it. It's nearly-perfect in being delicious, but it's not what the recipe said.

[davidgillon]

I'll bet you're a good cook

Stomach says yes :)

[alexseanchai]

you are actively doing me a favour if you let me cook for you

Sounds like the best kind of favor: all parties win.