Hello hello, welcome back to this week's edition of Sunday Chillin'! Some beautiful days in the Bay Area this past week, hope everyone is enjoying the outdoors wherever you may be in the Big Wide World.
The Harsh Reality
I'm going to say something that you won't hear too often online: cooking is hard. Even with literally millions of videos, articles, and tutorials on how to make every dish under the sun, the actual act of cooking itself is no easy task.
Hundreds of YouTubers publish videos every day trying to obfuscate this fact, but those of you who have ever tried cooking most of your meals from scratch will know that it's got quite the learning curve. I spend a disproportionate amount of my time perusing the web for interesting recipes, and many of them follow a similar pattern that looks something like this:
"Hey guys, today we're going to make a SUPER simple version of Jamaican Jerk chicken. Here's the short list of 44 ingredients that you'll need for this recipe. Before we get started, let's do these 15 prep work steps that I'm going to condense into a 1 minute montage, but will likely take you 30 minutes. Also btw, you better have EVERY ingredient (especially the pickled antelope spleen and the specialized mint leaves found only on the banks of Euphrates) if you want to achieve that 'authentic taste'. I guess you could substitute chicken bouillon and normal mint for them instead, but if you do that, you're worse than trash lmao. After you have everything ready, here are the 14 steps you have to follow with precise timings and concentration to get everything tasting just right. If you look away for even a second, you may as well have not started aha. I know all of this'll take you like 2 hours, but I'm gonna advertise this as a 20 minute recipe so you click on it. Anyway, happy cooking! Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe for more easy weeknight recipes like this one!"
You'll see many variations of this, but these instructions are all designed by a team of elite psychologists to be as discouraging as possible.
Here's the thing: it's all BS. Whenever I see videos like this, I try to keep a few things in mind.
One: Cooking is one of the most fundamentally human activities, something that our ancestors have been doing in some form or another for literally hundreds of thousands of years. It functioned as a way to safely feed ourselves, and for much of history, it was no more complicated than "fire, meat, eat." Later generations learned to add in salt, spices, herbs, side dishes, etc. but this is all just icing on the cake. In order to feed yourself and be satisfied, you really don't need the entirety of Whole Foods in your pantry or be a Michelin-trained chef.
Two: Creativity is a huge part of cooking. Many of the most delicious foods that people make were borne out of the need to stretch a few ingredients as far as possible. Braised meats, barbecue, pickled foods; these are all attempts to either turn a seemingly useless ingredient into a luxurious entree or to preserve and enhance food. Creativity has always been at the heart of the best cooking, and not having every ingredient shouldn't discourage you from trying to make something. [1]
Three: Cooking, much like any other life skill, takes time to develop and get good at. There are a lot of moving parts and individual steps, and as you do it more and more, you get a better sense of intuition for how you should order your tasks. You also figure out at what points in the process you should pay more or less attention (or panic) and what allows for some leeway. [2] As you learn these nuances, the whole ordeal becomes much more enjoyable overall.
Four: These YouTubers and content-creators would be out of a job if you realized that they were full of it. Their job is to make videos that you'll sit and watch, like, bookmark, and then never touch again. After all, it's not like anyone is actually going to make a new recipe every single day so it's really just an ad-revenue and merch pipeline. [3] To lead you down the Enlightened Path™, I'll include some examples of good cooking channels in the footnotes for those of you who are interested. [4]
Five: Food that you work hard to make tastes better, probably since we neurologically connect our struggle with the payoff. It's likely some sort of dopamine pathway, but I won't bore you with the details, we'll just say that you can really taste the effort. [5] I'm sure you've all experienced this firsthand without me even saying it though. I've made dishes that if someone served to me at a restaurant, would be considered a 3/5 at best, but since I made it myself, evoke a response closer to a 4 or 4.2/5. There's a lot of satisfaction to be had from seeing a dish come together, and even more when you start to get faster and more skilled. [6]
I guess this is all just to say, I think we should all try to cook a bit more when possible. The culture in tech in the Bay Area means that many of our comrades no longer have to cook at all basically, but I think there's definitely some sense of cultural and humanistic loss when this is the case. So get out there, buy some ingredients that you think might work in a dish, and give it your best shot. What's the worst that could happen? Also, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more weekly newsletters like this one! Happy cooking!
Hundreds of YouTubers publish videos every day trying to obfuscate this fact, but those of you who have ever tried cooking most of your meals from scratch will know that it's got quite the learning curve. I spend a disproportionate amount of my time perusing the web for interesting recipes, and many of them follow a similar pattern that looks something like this:
"Hey guys, today we're going to make a SUPER simple version of Jamaican Jerk chicken. Here's the short list of 44 ingredients that you'll need for this recipe. Before we get started, let's do these 15 prep work steps that I'm going to condense into a 1 minute montage, but will likely take you 30 minutes. Also btw, you better have EVERY ingredient (especially the pickled antelope spleen and the specialized mint leaves found only on the banks of Euphrates) if you want to achieve that 'authentic taste'. I guess you could substitute chicken bouillon and normal mint for them instead, but if you do that, you're worse than trash lmao. After you have everything ready, here are the 14 steps you have to follow with precise timings and concentration to get everything tasting just right. If you look away for even a second, you may as well have not started aha. I know all of this'll take you like 2 hours, but I'm gonna advertise this as a 20 minute recipe so you click on it. Anyway, happy cooking! Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe for more easy weeknight recipes like this one!"
You'll see many variations of this, but these instructions are all designed by a team of elite psychologists to be as discouraging as possible.
Here's the thing: it's all BS. Whenever I see videos like this, I try to keep a few things in mind.
One: Cooking is one of the most fundamentally human activities, something that our ancestors have been doing in some form or another for literally hundreds of thousands of years. It functioned as a way to safely feed ourselves, and for much of history, it was no more complicated than "fire, meat, eat." Later generations learned to add in salt, spices, herbs, side dishes, etc. but this is all just icing on the cake. In order to feed yourself and be satisfied, you really don't need the entirety of Whole Foods in your pantry or be a Michelin-trained chef.
Two: Creativity is a huge part of cooking. Many of the most delicious foods that people make were borne out of the need to stretch a few ingredients as far as possible. Braised meats, barbecue, pickled foods; these are all attempts to either turn a seemingly useless ingredient into a luxurious entree or to preserve and enhance food. Creativity has always been at the heart of the best cooking, and not having every ingredient shouldn't discourage you from trying to make something. [1]
Three: Cooking, much like any other life skill, takes time to develop and get good at. There are a lot of moving parts and individual steps, and as you do it more and more, you get a better sense of intuition for how you should order your tasks. You also figure out at what points in the process you should pay more or less attention (or panic) and what allows for some leeway. [2] As you learn these nuances, the whole ordeal becomes much more enjoyable overall.
Four: These YouTubers and content-creators would be out of a job if you realized that they were full of it. Their job is to make videos that you'll sit and watch, like, bookmark, and then never touch again. After all, it's not like anyone is actually going to make a new recipe every single day so it's really just an ad-revenue and merch pipeline. [3] To lead you down the Enlightened Path™, I'll include some examples of good cooking channels in the footnotes for those of you who are interested. [4]
Five: Food that you work hard to make tastes better, probably since we neurologically connect our struggle with the payoff. It's likely some sort of dopamine pathway, but I won't bore you with the details, we'll just say that you can really taste the effort. [5] I'm sure you've all experienced this firsthand without me even saying it though. I've made dishes that if someone served to me at a restaurant, would be considered a 3/5 at best, but since I made it myself, evoke a response closer to a 4 or 4.2/5. There's a lot of satisfaction to be had from seeing a dish come together, and even more when you start to get faster and more skilled. [6]
I guess this is all just to say, I think we should all try to cook a bit more when possible. The culture in tech in the Bay Area means that many of our comrades no longer have to cook at all basically, but I think there's definitely some sense of cultural and humanistic loss when this is the case. So get out there, buy some ingredients that you think might work in a dish, and give it your best shot. What's the worst that could happen? Also, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more weekly newsletters like this one! Happy cooking!
Sensory Deprivation
There are some schools of thought that claim that you shouldn't listen to music while you cook because that'll prevent you from really immersing yourself in the process. You should hear the sizzle of the meat on the pan so that you can know when to pull it off, you should smell the aroma of the garlic when it becomes fragrant but just before it burns, you should touch the stove to know when it's too hot to touch, stuff like that. [7] But who cares what other people think, I'm not asking you to plug your nose anyway. Here are some songs that I've been listening to recently when I'm stumbling around my kitchen cooking, and I hope they'll provide you with joy as you do so as well. And hey, even if you screw up the recipe, at least you'll have listened to some bops along the way!
Palm Trees - Goldlink
Spotify | YouTube
wish i never - Kehlani
Spotify | YouTube
Seein Ya - Radio, Duckwrth, Ambré, Jesse Boykins III, ESTA., Mack Keane
Spotify | YouTube
I'm Good Luv, Enjoy. - Aaron May
Spotify | YouTube
Kangaroo Court - Capital Cities
Spotify | YouTube
See you all next Sunday!
suhaas
————————————————————————————
If you'd like to share this newsletter with your friends, please direct them to this link.
Here are Spotify and YouTube playlists with all the songs so far.
[1] Probably a good place to draw the line is if a recipe is called "oven-baked salmon," and you don't have an oven, a kitchen, salmon, or any sort of fish, it might behoove you to look at another recipe. But in general, it can be fun to venture off the beaten path sometimes and substitute in ingredients just to see what will happen. I don't necessarily recommend doing this on a day when you're too hungry to think properly. But let's be honest, on those days, everything tastes gr8 anyway.
[2] After some point, you start to dial in what you consider burnt vs. reasonably charred, or how much garlic is too much garlic (there's no such thing unless you're going on a date later), or how you choose to define a tablespoon. Does anyone else find it strange how there's no objective measure of a tablespoon?...really makes you think...but yeah, just measure with your heart tbh.
[3] Most of these "chef influencers" have the most trash merch in the world anyway. Why would I want to buy your $40 sweatshirt that says "ALWAYS SALT YOUR PORK 😂😂😂"? You should have to pay me to wear that.
[4] Some great cooking channels are Kenji Lopez-Alt, Internet Shaquille, Ethan Chlebowski, NOT ANOTHER COOKING SHOW, and Pro Home Cooks. I've tried recipes and methods from all of these folks, and they are straight to the point, assure you that you don't need every specific ingredient, and generally provide solid frameworks for recipes, rather than prescriptions.
[5] Occasionally, however, this goes in the exact opposite direction. One time my old college roommate and I spent over 24 hours making a ramen broth from scratch. Boiling the bones, making all of the toppings, the whole shebang. We sat down to eat the ramen after the long journey, both took a bite, ecstatically looked at each other and devoured the whole bowl! It was great! And then we poured ourselves a second bowl, ate another bite, and then stopped. I looked at him. He looked at me. And we both knew. It tasted like trash lmaaaoooooo. That first bowl tasted "good" on the merit of our effort alone. We ended up dumping gallons of broth, but it was so funny that I'm still glad we went through it.
[6] The first time I finished making a meal within 30 minutes, I was so proud of myself. I imagine this is what Einstein felt like when he wrapped his head around special relativity. Or maybe not. But I've been chasing that high ever since. I'll let you know when I reach my version of general relativity.
[7] Nothing in this newsletter is ever medical advice. Please consult your doctor before placing your hand on any stove.