Misha Fletcher - Cooking is Terrible

Hi, friends. This is a cookbookfor when you cannot deal with the idea of cooking, or the idea of eating, orthe idea of either. Or when youre feeling lazy. Or when you just dont want toengage. Its mostly relatively healthy food, and all relatively loweffortdepending on how fast you can boil water, most of this can be done inunder fifteen minutes, often faster if youre using pre-chopped veggies orpre-cooked noodles or whatever. Sometimes theres a time investment, but whenthats the case, its hands-off timebung this thing in the oven and thenignore it for an hour or twelve.

I, like all millennials, havespent my fortune on avocados, so am usually broke. Sometimes I can afford tospend more money so that I can eat more easily, sometimes not. If you canafford to buy precooked rice and pre-chopped vegetables or whatever, doingeverything else in here will be easier. If you cant afford to buy them, thisshould still be relatively accessible, but will require more prep work. I betthat you already knew that, though, because if you have no money, you alreadyknow how to play this game.

Theres not a ton of meatthe vastmajority of this book would be suitable for vegetarians. This is partly becausecooking meat is usually more of a time investment than I care to make in food,and partly because meat is expensive. Also, frankly, because its a pain in theass to clean up, and while I do, in fact, love me a cheeseburger, I do notlove scraping all that schmutz off my skillet when Im done.

These are fairly adaptablerecipes. I assume that if youre on some sort of special diet, you dont need alot of help adaptingif youre gluten-free, you know to use gluten-free soysauce and shirataki or rice noodles; if youre vegan, you know to usedairy-free milk and margarine; if youre low-carb, you know to put yoursandwich in lettuce or a low-carb wrap. If you cant eat eggs, you know howto use egg substitute. Youre not stupid. I believe in your ability to not makeyourself sick.

Most of this is, like I said,healthyish. Note the ish. Theres a lot of things that call for bacon orcheese because, frankly, bacon and cheese are the kind of food that make otherfoods worth eating, and things need to taste good enough that youre willing toeat them. You can probably leave them out, if you want. The world wont end.There arent any recipes in here that involve kale, and I cant wait until weas a society can stop pretending that it tastes like anything other than chewybitter-green sadness. That said, if you love kale, go ahead and use cooked kaleinstead of spinach or whatever.

I dont know what a superfood is.I mean, I can give you a list of themI think that its most berries,andavocados? Sometimes nuts? Maybe? Probably fucking kale. Who knows. Imbasically telling you what Ive cribbed from Buzzfeed headlines. I dont carewhat superfoods are. If I like them, Im probably already eating as much ofthem as I can afford, and if I dont like them, Im not going to start eat thembecause Buzzfeed says I should. (Hi, Buzzfeed! Hire me! Ill pretend to likekale in exchange for sweet, sweet cash money.)

Some of these non-recipes mightseem ridiculousdo you really need an entire page listing out basic sandwiches?Maybe not. Sometimes I do, though, so its in here. If youre consistently morefunctional than I am, congratulations! Thats awesome for you, and you shouldfeel free to skip that page and spend the time you wouldve spent reading itfeeling smug. Its fine.

Finally, please remember thateating something is better than eating nothing. Bodies are weirdand inconvenient, but we dont have better options yet, so you gotta eat.Sometimes just getting food, any food, into yourself is a victory. The othernight I ate a bunch of potato chips dipped in salad dressing because somehow,that sounded like the least gross option, and I had to eat something. Sometimesthats all you can do, and thats ok. If you can manage a tiny bit more thanthat, though, this book might help.