It’s not like you don’t care about cooking. You’re using Ottolenghi’s “Jerusalem” as a laptop stand right now! You fell in love with this apartment because the kitchen had a whole “modern farmhouse” vibe, remember? But, at 5 P.M., you’d rather drop a mortar and pestle on your foot than go to Whole Foods. Well, good news: with a few simple life hacks, anyone can enjoy a home-cooked meal every night of the week.
For starters, try putting a little time aside on the weekends to prep for the week ahead. Prep some heirloom beans. Prep some ancient grains. Prep a whole roast chicken, or, better yet, a whole goat. Don’t think of this as spending your entire Sunday cooking, because you’re not cooking. You’re prepping!
Do you know how many meals you can get out of a single roast chicken? Each carcass contains no less than a hundred meals. If you find the thought of chicken night after night boring, did you ever stop to wonder if maybe you’re the one who’s boring? And remember: a free-range chicken that was raised sustainably can taste like a hot-fudge sundae, or spaghetti Bolognese—that’s how different it is from regular old grocery-store chicken.
You know what else you can make with all your chicken carcasses? Stock. Astronauts in space find time to make their own stock. What’s your excuse?
Open your cupboards right now. What do you see? If you can scrounge up an onion, a bottle of wine, thirteen anchovies, a tub of beef tallow, pickled kohlrabi, and single-varietal white-wine vinegar—voilà! You’ve got dinner. (You can substitute plain vinegar in a pinch, but it’ll make the flavor ever so slightly disgusting.)
Don’t let anyone tell you that making your own tomato sauce is hard. Seriously, do not let them tell you that. Stuff their mouths full of parchment paper and hit them over the head with a lovingly seasoned cast-iron skillet. Those people need to learn to trust their instincts in the kitchen!
You already know you can use Mason jars for wedding centerpieces, but did you know that you can also use them to store food? Make ten identical salads and shove them into ten Mason jars. Each day before work, put a Mason jar in your bag. At lunchtime, don’t ask yourself what’s the point of making money if this is how you’re going to live—just dig in!
The No. 1 secret to home cooking is starting with quality ingredients. At the farmers’ market, let your eyes and nose guide you to the foods that your body is craving macronutritionally. Is that slightly disconcerting white eggplant beckoning you? Bring that friendly ghost home! What’s a duck lardon? Time to find out! Limit yourself to one prepared-food item, perhaps a savory hand-pie from that aproned cutie you always see at the climbing gym. (Climbing gym? You don’t have time to make stock, but you do have time to dangle on a leash?)
If, several days later, you throw out an expensive pile of limp vegetables and rotten meat, and the only thing you actually ate was the hand pie, ask yourself if you even deserve to live in a house with running water.
Whatever you do, don’t pay someone to mail your dinner to your house in parcelled-out pieces, like sad grownup Legos. I would rather starve than use a mail-order meal kit, and the only difference between you and me is that I’m a professional cookbook author and Chez Panisse-trained chef who gets paid to think about food all day and you’re not.
So, next time you come home from work exhausted, don’t ask yourself if trying to put a hot meal on the table every night like Grandma did is unrealistic, because Grandma didn’t have thirty-eight thousand dollars in student loans to pay off, and Grandma wasn’t out there delivering sushi burritos for Uber Eats on nights and weekends.
Here’s a better question: Do you have a couple pig jowls, a bunch of Tuscan kale, and some dried cassoulet beans lying around? If so, you’re just three and a half hours away from a great home-cooked meal!
(Add eight hours if you forgot to soak the beans.)
