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SOME NUANCE REQUIRED, Ep. 6: Cooking from Scratch
We choose vacations where we can cook for ourselves.
I know how that sounds.
Who goes on vacation to cook? Isn’t the whole point to not cook? To eat out, indulge, try everything, loosen up, have drinks, stay out late, and treat every meal like part of the experience?
That is certainly the standard version.
But we do not really see vacation that way.
We see our annual vacation as preventative medicine.
It is two weeks of as much sun as possible. Two weeks to reset, actually reset. And if we are spending the money and taking the time to do that, I am not interested in sabotaging it with restaurant food three times a day, hangovers, missed sunrises, and feeling like garbage by day three.
So we rent a place with a kitchen.
And then we cook.
Eggs and meat for breakfast. Some version of tortillas, ground meat, cheese, guacamole, and fruit for the other meals. That is basically it.
And everyone feels good.
No one is sluggish. No one is cranky. The adults do not lose half the morning recovering. We do not miss sunrise because dinner got too indulgent and the whole next day got dragged down with it.
It works because the food is simple, repetitive, and stable.
Which, honestly, is also how we eat the other fifty weeks of the year.
I’m Not Good at This in the Aspirational Way
When people talk about cooking from scratch online, it is almost always framed in this very aesthetic, aspirational way.
Beautiful counters.
Farmers’ market hauls.
Sourdough starter bubbling away.
Weekly meal plans.
That is not me.
I am not organized. I am not particularly imaginative (re: cooking). I am not one of those people who naturally builds a gorgeous rotating menu and remembers what dinner is on Thursday by Monday afternoon.
And yet we cook from scratch almost every day.
So clearly that version of it is not required.
The Internet Makes It Feel Like a Performance
I think this is one of the main reasons people get turned off before they even begin.
Cooking from scratch gets framed like a performance.
As if doing it properly means meal prepping on Sundays, soaking and fermenting things, rotating seasonal recipes (that one actually is useful but done in a very simple way), and generally behaving like a person whose life is both calmer and more photogenic than your own.
But real life is usually much duller than that.
And thank goodness.
Because the truth is, cooking from scratch can be extremely repetitive. It can be deeply unimaginative. It can be a piece of meat in a pan, potatoes in the oven, and lots of love (and salt).
That counts.
My Planning Ahead Is Not Meal Planning
This is the part I think matters most.
People hear “planning ahead” and assume that means spreadsheets, recipe boards, or little containers lined up in the fridge.
My version of planning ahead is much simpler.
I bought our meat for the year.
That is it.
We have a (few) freezer(s) full of a whole beef, whole pork, some filler chicken, and that one decision removes most of the friction around food.
Because when five o’clock hits and I think, what are we having, the answer is always some version of meat.
I do not have to wonder if the store is out of what I need.
I do not have to debate whether the quality is good this week.
I do not have to flinch at the price.
I do not have to build dinner from scratch as a concept.
The core of it is already handled.
And that, to me, is what planning ahead actually is: building conditions that make ordinary life easier.
Not creating a fantasy of perfect preparedness.
Seasonal Eating Solves Problems Before They Start
Living in Calgary also changes the equation.
Winter is long. A lot of the “fresh” produce people are told to build meals around is imported, fragile, and weirdly stressful to keep up with by February.
I no longer participate in that rhythm.
In winter, we eat potatoes, onions, carrots, some cabbage, some Brussels sprouts. Things that store. Things that make sense. Things that do not rot in three days and leave you feeling guilty because you had good intentions and now the spinach is sludge (and it was gross to begin with lol).
That, too, is part of the system.
And no, it is not sexy.
It is infrastructure.
Cooking From Scratch Does Not Have to Be Imaginative
I think this is the part people most need permission to hear.
Cooking from scratch does not have to be creative.
It does not have to express your identity.
It does not have to prove you are good at domestic life.
It does not have to become a hobby.
It does not have to be interesting.
It just has to feed people.
That may sound obvious, but I think a lot of people have lost sight of it. There is this subtle pressure now that even your most ordinary Tuesday dinner should somehow say something about you. That it should be novel, beautiful, balanced, exciting, or at least worthy of being shown.
I reject that completely.
In our house, cooking is not an art project. It is not content. It is not self-expression.
It is infrastructure.
And once you start seeing it that way, the whole thing gets easier.
Boring Is Often a Sign That Something Is Working
Is our food boring?
Yes, sometimes.
But everybody eats. Everybody is full. Everybody feels good.
And I think that matters a lot more than whether dinner was original.
There is a real benefit to repetitive, stable, seasonal food. It conserves cognitive energy.
No constant grocery runs.
No recipe research at 4:30.
No chasing novelty because the internet has convinced you variety is always virtue.
No low-grade decision fatigue about what to make, whether it is healthy enough, or if you are doing enough.
Just steadiness.
And steadiness matters more than people think.
Food Should Not Take Up Your Whole Brain
One of the most underrated things about simple cooking is what it stops demanding from you.
When food becomes basic, repeatable, and solved, it fades into the background a bit.
And that is incredibly freeing.
Especially for women, food has a way of becoming this constant mental presence. What to eat. How much. Is this healthy? Is this balanced? Am I doing this right? Should I make something better? More interesting? More optimized? More impressive?
It is exhausting.
But when you build a simple structure — freezer full of meat, seasonal roots, repeatable meals — you stop negotiating with food all day long.
You are just fed.
And being just fed is a surprisingly luxurious state.
Food Is Better When It Stops Being a Project
This is maybe the deeper philosophical layer for me.
When food becomes simple, it stops being a project. It stops being a personality. It stops being something you endlessly curate, optimize, discuss, and identify with.
It becomes background support for a real life.
And that is where I think food belongs (for me).
Not because food is unimportant. Quite the opposite. It is important enough that I want it solved well, not dramatized constantly.
Once food is handled, your brain becomes available for better things.
More meaningful work.
More interesting conversations.
More creative thought.
More attention for your children.
More life.
That, to me, is the real luxury.
Not culinary diversity.
Not gourmet skill.
Not turning dinner into a show.
Just the quiet confidence of knowing: we are fed, we feel good, and I did not have to make this louder than it needed to be.
Stable Might Be the Most Radical Thing
We live in a world that is constantly trying to make everything louder, more complicated, and more personalized.
Your wardrobe must say something.
Your skincare must say something.
Your supplement routine must say something.
Your dinner must apparently say something too.
I am less and less interested in that.
I think there is something quietly radical about choosing stable instead.
Not because it is virtuous.
Not because it makes you superior.
But because it frees your attention for things that actually matter.
That is what cooking from scratch has become for me.
Not a performance.
Not a domestic identity.
Not proof of anything.
Just one of the simplest ways to make real life run better.
And in the end, that may be what food is for.
To earn its place by getting out of the way.
xo Caitlin