Finding Time to Cook
I don’t know who can relate, but finding time to cook has actually been a really large issue for me for at least the last year of my life. It certainly became even harder when I moved out on my own. And I used to really blame myself for being bad at “adulting”.
Feed yourself. How basic can you get?
Well, I'm really quite proud of myself because I made a lot of meals yesterday. I started the morning with a Daily Harvest smoothie: Ginger + Greens (my favorite), I then actually made myself a sandwich, and then meal prepped future sandwiches and salads by chopping tomatoes, cucumbers, onions…I did everything. I even tried to make my sandwich like a panini (shout out to my birthday wishlist, I really would very much like a panini maker).
I'm also actually trying this new home delivery service called Gobble. This was my second meal with them. The first one was a shrimp linguine pasta that was pretty easy to make. I do think it took more than 15 minutes. However, my steak with patatas bravas situation that I had tonight actually did take 18 minutes to make.
So honestly, I'll give them that 15-minute prep time promise because I probably was slightly unfocused and could have done it in 15 minutes, I also definitely cooked the steak longer than they told me to, but I don't really like my steak to be bleeding on me.
Why am I saying all of this? What's the importance? So what, I made food. What’s the big deal?
You have to feed yourself constantly. It's just the thing that keeps happening. You keep getting hungry every day and every day you have to eat something. And if we're going to be honest, I really kinda felt like I was failing at life because this was a consistent source of stress.
I would predictably get to this place of being hungry (you get hungry several times a day, so it wasn't a surprise), and especially during peak application season in the fall I would be like, oh shoot, I'm hungry. I have no plan.
You would think that after the fourth or fifth or 11th or 12th or 20th time I got to the place of like, oh shoot, I'm hungry and I have no plan I would maybe think about a different plan, but no, I just kept repeating the cycle over and over and over again and watched the amount of money I gave to Uber Eats grow exponentially. I ate a lot of Thai and ate a lot of McDonald's. Sometimes I would make eggs for breakfast, but most times I would skip breakfast if I woke up literally right before my first meeting. Listen, I'm not a morning person. Some people say, I’m not a morning person, but they get up at 7am. When I say I’m not a morning person, I mean I would be rolling into my 10:00 AM meeting, after waking up at 9: 55 a.m. So shout out to zoom.
Sometimes I would have brunch (read: lunch) and then I would just kind of work. I was hyper-focusing a lot with my ADHD and so I would just work and then I would realize it was eight o'clock somehow, I was hungry, and I had no dinner plans. And at that point, I'm so hungry that I don't feel like waiting for anything that's 45 or 50 minutes away. I'm also completely done with decision fatigue so I don't actually want to think about what I want to eat. So, it was Thai or McDonald's, or sometimes if I was feeling fancy, we'd do a little California Pizza Kitchen. If I was trying to be healthy, we'd do a little Cava, a little Panera. But really like that was it.
Productivity Guilt
It's not even fully that I didn't have the time to cook, but it also is. That was my first thought: I don't have time to do this. I don't have time to do this. But really, I didn't have the energy to cook. I didn't have the mental time to cook. I think for me, I feel guilty a lot because I feel like I use the time excuse incorrectly and then I judge myself. I'll say, “oh, I don't have time to do the laundry. I don't have time to unpack my suitcase”… but then I will also say to myself, “but you took a two-hour nap, but you were on Instagram, but like, what did you really do when you were looking at your computer today? You actually did have time.”
And because I have this mindset of having to make every living second the most productive and efficient second in the world (which is super unhealthy and one day I will break out of it) I then judged myself for seemingly wasting time, which probably could be defined as relaxing.
I declare that 2022 is going to be the Year of the Nap. I went to the IECA professional retreat conference this past week and someone told me about Nap Ministries. I've never resonated with something more in my life. They say it is a resistance. I love that. Reframing napping as something lazy you do to an active act of resistance and disobedience to society. I think whole theses could be written around nap ministries. I'm fascinated by them.
I am also simultaneously reading Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, and there's a lot in there about millennials and our inability to relax because of conditioning from our childhood depending on what side of the millennial spectrum you're on. I'm on the younger side, so certainly this applies to me because it's kind of evolved and gotten worse over time, but the over-scheduling in our childhood and the need to do all these things to be perfect and to get into college and whatever, has actually created this sense of guilt that I and a lot of people feel when we’re not being “productive.” You just feel like you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing but really it’s just incorrect conditioning.
But, I digress. So, I'm judging myself all the time for what I feel like I have time to do because I know that physically I have time to do it. (One more side note: I will also say that if any of you have ever seen my calendar, I'm sorry. It's probably going to scar you for life. I just fill all the white space. This is something else I’m actively working to change in 2022, my need to fill all the white space in order to not feel guilty for being unproductive. I’m really excited to see how much I have grown away from this mindset in December 2022).
So I was feeling guilty because it's like, come on Sydney, you have time. You have one or two hours on your weekend to just meal prep, just do it. Like just spend 20 minutes cooking. I ordered Blue Apron for the first week that I moved into this house and literally proceeded to never cook any of them and felt terribly guilty for wasting all that food. It was such, such a disappointment. And I was like, “what is wrong with you? You have time to do this.”
But the truth is, I'm tired. And I think that's what I'm trying to give myself grace for in this season. While the calendar may physically have space, we are not really meant to fill all of that space. It's not healthy and we can't do it (more on this and the app Sunsama in a future blog).
Learning to Meal Prep and Give Myself Grace
Eventually, I was tired of eating Thai and McDonald's because I have an auto-immune disease and I do also struggle with guilt because I should be eating this really great anti-inflammation diet, watching what I eat, and exercising every day. And my life is full of shoulds and when it comes to my health, I find that there's no shortage of ways I feel like I'm failing myself. But I made this logical decision that I was going to hire help for meal prep. In Rachel Rogers’ book, We Should All Be Millionaires, she talks a lot about hiring a personal assistant for yourself. I think it's fantastic. So I just posted in my local town, Facebook, and this really cool Indian mom responded. And while she’s no longer working for me, it was a really cool arrangement because she showed me how to meal prep. And I think that was really important. I think God was like, you need someone to help you learn how to do this so I'm going to send you someone to teach you how to do this because this is actually not something that I've ever seen.
We didn't always eat the healthiest growing up and, in elementary school, my mom definitely made my lunch and cut up vegetables and fruit (my mom is the best), but as I got older, a lot of life started happening to my family with military deployments and their separation and divorce and some financial stress, a lot of that went away and so eating healthy did not become an ingrained habit for me in my teenage years.
And so when I had Natasha, that started to help me see what Meal Prep really looked like. She went to trader Joe's, which I have always just assumed was expensive, It's actually not as bad as I thought it was, and she bought all these things. It was weird because I didn’t tell her what to buy or what to cook, I just gave her a list of what I didn’t like to eat and she produced all these things. I wasn't sure how this arrangement was going to work, but she bought things I never would have put in my fridge. She made pasta, she made omelets with potatoes and vegetables (I have never had an omelet with a potato in it, but this is very filling and that makes a lot of sense). She made breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. She cut up all of these fruits because I realized that I love fruit, but I will actually only eat them if they’re proportioned.
She prepped them so that I would eat them. It sounds crazy but if I open the fridge and there's a huge thing of fruit and I’m rushing in between meetings, I get overwhelmed and just don’t eat them. I know, its ridiculous, but I was just that mentally tired so now they’re in these tiny portions and it’s not a problem anymore. That changed the game. She made like little Tupperware containers with like tomatoes, onions, spinach, and cucumbers for my sandwich. It was so easy to make sandwiches.
I had never really thought about it, honestly. I'm not like a sandwich girl, but she also bought different bread. She brought this panini flatbread that's like so great. And it just makes you feel on top of your life. With flatbread sandwiches you no longer feel like a basic bitch, you feel like a bad ass fancy adult. She bought these really cool spreads like red pepper hummus spreads, and red pepper eggplant spreads. She introduced me to mahi mahi burgers, Turkey burgers, and vegetable masala burgers, which never would have made it in my house otherwise. She also made really cool things with green beans and chicken and rice, but again, she pre-portioned all these dinners so all I had to do was take out a piece of Tupperware, put it into my microwave, and eat it. Lastly, she made smoothies and cut up little vegetable and some hummus so I could snack.
This really worked for the first couple of months and then, you know, I got COVID and so we stopped for a little bit and my schedule is still pretty full, but I realize I feel less overwhelmed and I have more of a peace about me right now and I think part of it is knowing what the roadmap is for meal prep and actually seeing it be done in real life rather than it just being this amorphous idea. Everyone's always just like meal prep, but I don't come from a meal prep family. I come from a “we make food and there are leftovers and we sort of eat it” family. I know some families have boards where they plan the menu for the week, and I have just never experienced or lived that life. That's just never been the household that I grew up in and my parents work a lot.
But yesterday, I cut up cucumbers and tomatoes and onions and put them in Tupperware and I pre-proportioned some dinner and I felt more accomplished than I had in months. I really don't think I would have thought about doing that without seeing her do it first though, which also taught me that sometimes we don't know what we don't know.
So you know, I still really don't have time to cook, but Gobble does the prep for me for dinners which is really great because I think I do have the mental energy for a 15-minute cooking break. I have all this leftover Tupperware that Natasha doesn’t want back so that also makes it easier to meal prep.
This might sound really basic and you might be rolling your eyes at how much a life transformation this is for me, but now I have my little like sandwich station. I have a shelf in my fridge that looks organized. But, I think what I gained the most is some grace for myself, because I'm really proud of myself. Cooking for yourself is still a basic thing that you're supposed to be able to do. I'm almost 28, so probably should have mastered it by now. But I felt really in control of the situation yesterday and excited about the food that I was going to eat. I felt energized by it. I felt happy and I felt joy and I think I reframed the problem from “finding the time to cook” to finding the time and finding ways to overcome my anxiety, decision fatigue, and mental blockage by engaging in a fun culinary experience and break for myself.
Who knows how this meal prep situation is going to last. Maybe next week I’ll find myself back to Uber Eats (I hope not) but for right now, I have hope and I’m excited about food (and my kitchen!) in 2022.