#i have to meal prep for this fucker and he WASTES HALF OF IT

[actual-corpse]

Was gone for a week and a half.

Cats had no water

Trash not taken out

Piss on tub

Shit on toilet

Dishes in sink

CATS. HAD. NO. WATER

I can forgive everything else, it's fucking annoying, what the fuck ever....

BUT THE CATS HAD NO WATER AND I DONT KNOW HOW LONG THEY DIDN'T HAVE WATER

[thenervouscook]

Nervous Cooking: An Intro and How To

Hello there. I’m a nervous cook. I hate wasting food. I don’t like being bad at things. I have a very complicated relationship with food, thanks to an eating disorder.

In short, I often feel daunted in the kitchen, have felt that a lot of recipes gatekeep information and make it hard to me to feel like cooking is accessible and fun.

I like food. I love the idea of cooking. With the help of some nice people I know, I’m making good progress into enjoying the kitchen, and playing around making things and swatting away the dreadful pretentiousness, snobbishness, and pomposity that sullies what is supposed to be a joyous, wholesome, and ultimately tasty activity.

So where to start? Before we get to sharing recipes, let’s have a breakdown of what we’re trying to do for ourselves, before we even turn the oven on.

How do we become less nervous in when cooking?

1. Put some music on.

There’s nothing as daunting as standing in your kitchen with a recipe open, feeling like you’re already set for failure before you’ve even begun. So with that, put some good tunes on. You might have to turn the volume down occasionally as it is distracting you too much from the task at hand, but honestly, set yourself up for a good time.

Hall & Oates are great for making your meal with.

2. Read the recipe first. Maybe read it a few times.

Too often, I’ve started cooking and followed the recipe as a go, only to find that the person who wrote the recipe can smash out some sauce in 40 seconds while it takes me ages to do, while I burn my onions in the process. 

Reading the recipe first enables you to plan for any tricky moments where you feel unsure, or indeed, helps you to work out how to re-word something that might confusing rather than having to translate it when you’re in the middle of cooking something.

Recently, I made something that said “add 100ml of stock”, which wasn’t included in the recipe itself - reading it through before setting off meant that I didn’t have a nervous breakdown halfway through.

3. Prep the ingredients

Foodies call it ‘mise en place’ - don’t worry about foreign phrases yet, we won’t be using them here and we’ll probably do a translation of cooking terms at some point. These phrases are perfectly fine to use if you know what you’re doing, but of course, when you’re a nervous cook, your brain can go “AAAAAAAAAARGH I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS AND I’M ALREADY TALKING MYSELF OUT OF COOKING AND I MAY AS WELL JUST GO TO THE CHIPPIE”.

Calm down. It’s all good. Maybe we’ll do a glossary of terms later, so we can understand what these people are talking about.

Don’t worry. Mise en place basically means getting everything ready before you start, like they do on the telly. You’ve seen a TV chef saying “add half a tablespoon of paprika’, and they just tip it out of a little bowl, rather than measuring out while the pan’s on? It’s that.

So, if you’re making a curry and the recipe says that 4 spices are all getting thrown in at the same time, then measure them out first, put it in a bowl, or a little glass dish you’ve saved from when you ate a fancy yoghurt that came in a glass thing rather than a plastic pot, or even a cleaned out plastic yoghurt pot - it literally doesn’t matter - you measure them out, throw them all into a thing, and when the time comes to add them to your cooking, you can lob them in the pan without thinking about it, because you did the groundwork before the stress of the timer.

And ‘mise en place’ will not be used again on this blog, because there’s no need really.

4. Convert American measurements in advance

If you’ve found a recipe that looks ace on an American site, you’ll soon find out they measure everything differently. They have a ‘cups’ system. 1 cup is 128g or 4.5 oz.

If your scales are accurate enough to measure 128g exactly, go nuts. If not, take the time to find another recipe that has measured things out in a way that is more useful to you. If you have the money, have a look online and buy something cheap that measures out in American cups. 

Just don’t get caught on the hop while you’re in the middle of cooking your tea and get yourself worked up.

5. You can still eat a cock-up

American writer Hanif Abdurraqib said: “I'm not normally one for baking — I get that it is mostly all about the following of instructions, but I think that has always made the task more daunting for me and my many anxieties. If I failed, that failure would be speaking to some greater inability, or it might tell me something about myself. But, my anxieties, though busy as ever, aren't very interested in whether or not I fail at the moment. Also, I have such a low bar for edible desserts. Even a failed baked good is still a baked good worth consuming, in my home.”

That’s one of the golden things good cooks never share - even when you mess up, chances are, you can still eat it. Set your bar low. Don’t tip it in the bin because you’ve failed or because it looks like a mess.

I made a banoffee pie, and was worried I was going to balls it up, because I’m rubbish at whisking. Talking to a very talented chef I know, she said “don’t bin it - mix it up and call it Banoffee Eton Mess style!”

That was a very important lesson to learn - if it doesn’t work out perfectly, then re-brand the fucker and eat it anyway.

6. Follow good food people and ignore perfectionists if you want

A lot of broadsheet food writers and TV chefs are perfectionists, and don’t share their mistakes. When they appear on TV, they’re often berating some poor amateur cook for messing up their flans or whatever, because they’ve entered a talent show like Great British Bake Off, Masterchef, or whatever.

Ignore all that if you want, or if it puts pressure on you. It’s just you in your kitchen, making something to eat. Doesn’t matter if it looks like a road accident when you put it on your plate, as long as it tastes good.

Everyone’s Instagram accounts only show you their successes, so you can write those off too, if they’re doing your head in.

That said, there’s good people out there who will show you short-cuts, things to not worry about, and enjoy food that looks like an absolute mess. David Chang is a good chef to follow - on his Instagram, he cooked chicken thighs in a plastic bag in the microwave ‘round his mums, and has a show called Ugly Delicious where the focus is about getting rid of the pointless rules and aesthetic bollocks that stops a lot of people from wanting to cook.

Brad Leone at Bon Appetite is another good egg - he’s very much a ‘bung it in, that should be alright shouldn’t it?’ type of cook. Very unpretentious. Good fun. Pronounces the word ‘water’ funnily.

7. Focus on flavour, not aesthetics

I talked to someone who knows a lot of professional chefs, and they told me the difference between restaurant food and what we cook at home is the delicious but disgusting amounts of salt and butter they put in everything. Like, you’ll use a splodge of butter in your food, and a pro chef will stick a whole pack in. 

Season the crap out of everything too. Keep tasting it as you go along - you’re not a pro kitchen who has to worry about sticking a spoon in your mouth and then returning it straight to the pan.

When a recipe says 2 cloves of garlic, and you know you love garlic, sod it, put 3 or 4 in.

If you’re nervous about making your food too salty, for example, then just follow the recipe to the letter, and then when you serve it up later, if it needs more, just whack a load on as a booster at the end. It’s cool.

8. Don’t worry about having loads of gear

You might read some recipes that ask you to pulverise something in a food processor and you might not have one. If you can afford the gear, fine, go wild. If not, see what the alternatives are. You might be able to do it by hand, or you might be able to cheat by buying some pre-mixed stuff. Cheating is good. Don’t worry yourself.

If you’re bad at mincing garlic, just buy a tube of garlic paste. The only people who would judge that are terrible people, and terrible people don’t deserve your cooking.

9. Worst case scenario

You’ve burned your food. You’ve used salt instead of sugar. The whole thing has gone so badly that it is inedible. You feel defeated and annoyed at yourself. You swear you’ll never cook again.

It’s okay to wallow for a bit, but remember this - if you angrily sling everything in the bin and walk to the chip shop or Maccies - a Big Mac or chips pie and gravy is still a 10 out of 10 meal to have. In terms of you eating, you’ve not failed yourself.

Get stuck into your nuggets meal and enjoy them, and you’ll remember to not put salt in, instead of sugar next time.

10. Give yourself a break

Chefs, foodies, and cooks often forget to tell you what it feels like to not know how to cook. That makes sense - they’ve been practising for ages.They’re at a certain level, and assume the person they’re talking to is at a certain level too. 

When they casually say “knock up a quick roux” and you’re not sure what a roux even is, that’s okay - you can either stop listening to them, and watch a YouTube video about what a roux is, how to make one, and what they’re for... or you can carry on watching your show and just have a holiday in someone else’s good skills.

I can play guitar quite well, but I don’t hear a blistering solo on a Steely Dan record and think ‘well, I may as well throw my guitar into the street’ - I can pootle along on mine, while enjoying someone else who is better at a thing than I am. Try and do the same with food shows. You can always turn them off if they’re making you feel depressed - you don’t owe anyone shit.

Remember how grateful you are when absolutely anyone else cooks for you and how you don’t judge anyone else’s food harshly, because you’re not an arsehole? Do the same for yourself.