Cooking In Your Season

Cooking from home comes at a cost - and from-scratch cooking needs to fit your life, not the other way around. Today, I’m looking at how we can keep the enjoyment of cooking and reduce the stress, by cooking in your season.

When Marie Kondo stops tidying…

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…how can the rest of us be expected to get it right?

You may have read some version of the headline “Marie Kondo has ‘kind of given up on tidying’” - referring to the “spark joy” tidying guru Marie Kondo expressing that her house is now messy a lot of the time and she doesn’t do extreme tidiness anymore. As you might expect, this headline is a bit click-baity - what she actually said is that she realises, after welcoming her third child, that it is not realistic for her at this stage in her life to try to maintain an uber tidy home. She hasn’t actually given up on any of the principles she uses to help other people tidy, but maybe sees the challenges that people face in a slightly new light.

This is a bit like me and what I mentioned in my previous article Why I Poured My Sourdough Starter Down The Sink. I’ve always claimed (and really meant it by the way!) to be a resource for all home cooks, even those with busy lives, little time to cook and/or many mouths to feed. But when you’re in a different situation yourself, you start seeing it in a whole new way. And like for Marie, it hasn’t made me abandon the principles I believe in, but it has made me a bit more realistic about what you can do at different stages in your life.

In my situation right now for example, being a new mum and having very limited time for… everything, I can’t, and don’t want to, spend all day in the kitchen. Food needs to be not just healthy, tasty and fun, but also quick to make and ideally quick to clear up. This does limit things. And I have certainly experienced - in a way I never did previously - the cost of home-made. Though you are gaining so much from cooking from scratch, and I talk about this a lot (better for your body, mind, planet, wallet and more!), there is also something to lose, if you are not prepared to be flexible about how you do it.

For a while after having my baby I was trying to keep up the level of from-scratch cooking that I was doing before, and it was really draining me. The processes I used to find fun were becoming hard and stressful, because they were taking me away from fully focusing on my baby or relaxing when I had the opportunity. It was less “sleep when the baby sleeps” and more “make homemade mayo when the baby sleeps”. I had created this reality in which, just because I knew how to do it, I “had to” make everything from scratch. It honestly took becoming completely exhausted, with my body and mind both suffering as a result, to be forced to take a step back and realise that sometimes, you just need to go a simpler route.

A lot of us are very all or nothing. And it’s a shame, because there are so many ways of having great practices in your life, like cooking from scratch, without becoming obsessed with it, and still benefitting greatly. And that’s what I’m here to remind you of today. There certainly is a cost to home-cooking, and you do have to put in some effort, which I honestly believe will be paid back to you with all the great benefits I mentioned before, but we are all responsible for drawing the line for ourselves. And the line moves.

We talk about what food is in season. But do we talk about what season we are in? Where you are at in your work life, your living situation and your home and family life are factors that you need to consider when you look at what you realistically can do in terms of home-cooking, and which areas would be good for you to focus on. What kind of kitchen do you have? What space do you have to store your food? What’s your budget? What else do you have to sacrifice in order to make this food? Depending on what is going on, you can adjust your expectations towards cooking your food at home, and re-evaluate this as your situation changes again.

Also, we don’t have to be so all or nothing. One week can look different to the next. If I was as famous as Marie Kondo, the headline would probably read something along the lines of “From-Scratch Cooking Guru Liv Austen has kind of given up on home-made meals; now buys fish fingers at the supermarket”. I did indeed buy fish fingers the other day, even though I have a recipe for breaded fish (it’s not even very time consuming!) on my own blog! But it was just one thing I could not be bothered to spend time doing, and luckily I could buy fish fingers without any “fishy” ingredients (thank you, Birds Eye!) - we had them with some lovely sweet beet mash, so we were still enjoying a half-homemade meal. And that’s fine for now, in my season.

How will you adjust your home-cooking to your season? Did this make you think differently about it? I’d love to hear from you! Email me at liv@thefromscratchbody.com