Food, itself, is complicated for me. I enjoy it, too much. I like cooking but hate grocery shopping. I’m busy. I am an embarrassingly picky eater. I am always trying to lose weight. This combination has me always in search of programs or products that will make it possible for me to manage dealing with all these issues at once. I tried a service called Fresh 20, which does the meal planning but leaves you responsible for the grocery shopping. I’ve tried Weight Watchers. I’ve tried eating only Lean Cuisines. I’ve tried low-carb diets. I’ve tried high-protein diets. I’ve tried combinations of various things. I’ve tried SlimFast during the day and one real meal at night. I’ve tried to keep healthy snacks around—fake junk food that only depresses me as it tries to serve as a plausible substitute for the real thing—beet chips, kale chips, pea crisps, rice cakes. Then I’ve thrown all that fake junk food out because I don’t want fake junk food, I want real junk food, and if I cannot have real junk food, I’d rather have no junk food at all. I’ve tried to eat fruits and nuts. I’ve tried fasting every other day. I’ve tried eating all my meals before eight p.m. I’ve tried eating five small meals a day. I’ve tried drinking enormous quantities of water each day to fill my stomach. I’ve tried to ignore my hunger.
In truth, these attempts have always been either fairly half-assed or short-lived.
In my quest to better nourish myself, I joined Blue Apron when I moved to Indiana in 2014. Blue Apron is a subscription service, where each week, they send you the ingredients, in the correct portions, for three meals. They deal with two of the most unpleasant cooking-related tasks: meal planning and grocery shopping. I was kind of skeptical about meal kits because members are given little control over the meals they receive. But if I was going to try and take better care of myself, I was going to put my best foot forward.
It’s really cute how everything is labeled and packaged. There are knickknacks that include things like tiny bottles of champagne vinegar and a little ramekin of mayonnaise. As someone who loves tiny things, I always considered unpacking the box something of an event. The ingredients are accompanied by full-color, full-page recipe cards with step-by-step instructions and pictures. There is little room for error, and yet there is still the human factor. I am the one who is left to prepare the meals, and my fallibility is particularly pronounced in the kitchen.
My first meal was a cannellini bean and escarole salad with crispy potatoes. I wasn’t at all sure what escarole is, but I decided it was spicy lettuce, a better, more accurate name. The amount of spicy lettuce Blue Apron sent was laughable, so I added a head of romaine hearts because lettuce has no calories or nutritional value but it can take up some space on a plate.
The recipe was simple enough. I washed and peeled two potatoes, sliced them, boiled them for the prescribed amount of time. While that was happening, I made the dressing—mayonnaise, fresh squeezed lemon, garlic. The recipe also called for capers but I hate them, so slimy and ugly, and while I was trying to work through my pickiness, there was only so much progress to be made in one sitting.
When the potatoes were ready, they went onto a baking sheet and I drizzled them with olive oil, salt, and pepper. They baked at 500 degrees for twenty-five minutes and my kitchen got unbearably hot. I began thinking about the melancholy of cooking for yourself when you are single and living alone. One of the many reasons it took me so long to learn how to cook and learn to enjoy cooking is that it often feels like such a waste to go to all that trouble for myself.
Dinner would not wait for melancholy, so after rinsing and draining the beans, I softened a yellow onion, then assembled the salad, adding tomato, the beans, the lettuce, the dressing, all served over the crispy potatoes. It all turned out fine even though I had the saddest collection of kitchen tools aiding me in the process. It was the first time in my life something I prepared bore any resemblance to the recipe from whence it came.
In another box, there were ingredients for an English pea ravioli dish. I began by softening four cloves of garlic and some onion. The onion looked hideous because I do not have knife skills. What should have been orderly diced onion was a quantity of awkwardly shaped onion chunks. When the onion and garlic were softened, I added the English peas, some salt and pepper. It all smelled good. I felt accomplished, and maybe even a little powerful, the mistress of my culinary domain.
I took the onions and peas off the heat and added some chopped mint, and then added it to fresh ricotta, an egg, and some Parmesan cheese. This was, in theory, the filling for my ravioli.
It’s interesting, I’ve noticed while cooking, how ingredients in their individual and naked state can be a bit repulsive but necessary, kind of like people. The egg, Parmesan, and ricotta, so wet and loose, did not thrill me. It felt way too intimate.
And then it came time to assemble the ravioli. I thought I followed the instructions correctly, but the ravioli did not reflect that. The assembly process itself was irritating. The pasta sheets wouldn’t hold together, no matter what I tried. I crimped the edges with a fork, but the edges would not stay crimped. I nearly threw the disastrous-looking ravioli against a wall because the tenor of my aggravation was wildly disproportionate to the potential of the meal I was attempting. In the end, I decided, Fuck it, and threw the sloppy mess into boiling water, hoping for the best, prepared to eat the worst.
The pockets of pasta I had tried to create quickly dissembled, coming apart limply at the seams. Tragedy was multiplying. Once I thought the pasta sufficiently cooked, I drained the whole mess into a strainer, and then put that mess in a saucepan with browned butter and let it simmer until it looked at least somewhat edible. The dissembled ravioli ended up tasting fine and I am sure there was a lesson in there somewhere about how almost anything can be salvaged when you cook, but I never did find that lesson.
Blue Apron and other meal kit services are well and good, but sometimes cooking is such a pain in the ass. It is exhausting wrapping my mind around having to prepare food to put in my body every single day, and living alone, I am always the one responsible for that preparation. The more I cook for myself, the richer my appreciation for women and men who cook for their families every day grows.
Some nights, it is a question of whether I have peanut butter, jelly, and bread so that the dinner problem is thusly solved. Of course, I cannot help but wonder when basic meals became problems rather than meals, complicated ordeals rather than daily, sustaining rituals. I love food, but it is so difficult to enjoy food. It is so difficult to believe I am allowed to enjoy food. Mostly, food is a constant reminder of my body, my lack of willpower, my biggest flaws.