Hello hello, welcome back to this month's edition of Sunday Chillin'! Hope everyone has been staying warm and safe (more safe than warm if you're on the west coast, wishing you warmth now is bad form).
This was maybe the least social month of my life. I hung out with people in person very little and I didn't venture outside my apartment except when absolutely necessary. [1] It was a somewhat strange experience, but not necessarily a bad one.
Instead of being social, I spent this month trying my best to build certain habits and get into some of the hobbies that I mentioned in my last newsletter. I'm happy to report that, by and large, it went pretty well! From practicing guitar daily to cooking way more often to working out regularly, I put a lot more hours into the things that I wanted to focus on.
I haven't made enough progress on things yet to share anything worthwhile, but I did want to mention a strategy that helped me a lot this month (and might help you with your goals too!). I realized that one of the big obstacles that stood between me and actually doing certain activities was the mental activation energy that comes with not knowing exactly what to do.
For example, in past years, I'd tell myself that I wanted to get through my backlog of saved recipes and would plan on doing so during the weekends. But then the weekend would roll around and I would spend all my time just deciding between the recipes. I really wanted to make them all so I would flip between videos and recipes for hours. And then at the end of all of this, I would check the time and it would be close to dinner time (or supper, as someone from 1963 might call it) so I'd just choose one almost at random. But alas, it would turn out that I didn't have a few key ingredients so I wasn't able to make that dish anyway. A single tear would roll down my cheek and I would abandon My Dreams™ for the weekend.
This time around, I tried a different approach. At the beginning of January, I sat down for ~30 minutes and I wrote out a recipe schedule for the month. It was super simple and didn't follow any particular method or theme. Just the date for a particular weekend and the name of a recipe (or two). Here's the schedule so far:
As you can see, there isn't much structure and certainly zero relation between the recipes that I wanted to make every week. But the important thing was that when the weekend actually came around, I didn't have to think as much. I could just look at my list and cook the recipe that Suhaas of January Past had already chosen. This also allowed me to plan in advance to make sure that I had the ingredients I needed by the time the weekend rolled around. Using this method, I managed to make 5 new recipes this month! I consider that a resounding success.
With that being said, I didn't succeed every week. The list you see above is after moving things around since I failed to make pasta gricia/amatriciana like 2 weeks in a row (it is harder to obtain guanciale than one would expect). [2] But that's ok, some progress is still better than none!
I also found that documenting what I made was really helpful. Immediately upon finishing cooking something new, I would speedwalk over to the lamp in my living room and take a photo of what I had made. [3] After eating, I would also sit down and write out the recipe I had just made, along with any modifications that I tried. It feels satisfying to have this steadily growing collection of photos and written recipes. As a bonus, this allows me to get better at food photography and recipe creation too. [4] Here's one of the photos that I took this month of the pan-seared chicken breast w/lemon butter sake sauce:
Anyway, I could go on and on about this, but I've seen great results with this strategy so I highly recommend that you give it a try as well. I've started to implement the same sort of planning schedule for what I'll practice on the guitar every day and this has increased my practice frequency and progress on that front too. Maybe if I get good enough, I'll include an audio recording one day. [5]
In the meantime, here are some audio recordings that are not made by me, but that I recommend nonetheless:
Pls write back and let me know if there are other similar strategies that have helped you move closer to your goals. Thanks for reading, see you all next month!
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] This was mostly due to the absolutely abysmal weather and my location relative to my friends. Who wants to go outside and commute for 45 minutes when it's so close to absolute zero?? Though I did catch up via phone/vchat with a lot of others, so maybe net social activity was still pretty average.
[2] This is especially surprising given that NYC has the largest population of Italian-Americans in the United States. I assume they're all just conspiring to keep the best ingredients to themselves.
[3] Thanks to everyone who received my spam of food photos and didn't complain. I will exercise more restraint in the coming months.
[4] Frying three birds with one skillet, as they say in the biz.
[5] This will require you to sign a waiver absolving me of any harm (physical, emotional, or spiritual) that may arise as a result of listening. Keep an eye out for a DocuSign link in your inbox.
