How to be a better cook in 2024

On redefining your approach to cooking, food, and yourself!

It’s 2024! Have some potatoes.

‘Tis the season for resolutions. For many people, those resolutions can have something to do with cooking. But often, I find that these goals can end up being quite vague. My resolution is to cook more and eat out less! To do more meal prep! Try new recipes! Waste less food!

While these goals are all great, and can very well be something to strive for, I’ve found that with something as tangible and routine-based as cooking, it can be much more effective to start with something concrete. Specific actions can then lead you to succeed at whatever cooking goal you’ve set for yourself, rather than the other way around!

So let me give you my thoughts on some of the most popular cooking resolutions, in a sort of “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie” style:

• If you change your mindset towards eating at restaurants, you’ll end up cooking for yourself more.

  • Many times, the resolution to “cook more and eat out less” comes from a place of guilt. Do you want to taste the food you make yourself? Do you feel like you’re spending too much money on restaurants and delivery? Or do you just feel like you “should” be eating out less? If you’re propelled by a sense of shame with regards to eating at restaurants or ordering delivery, you’ll only end up treating cooking as a reluctant replacement for something you have to admit you enjoy. The way I’ve incorporated this into my own life has been to treat one day a week as “ordering food” day. If it’s not Friday, I’m not ordering food (or at least, trying not to). This was admittedly easier for me to implement because I did love to cook already, and I’d integrated cooking into my daily routine. But if you change your mindset around restaurant vs. home-cooked meals so that you don’t view cooking as a chore or a simple cost-saver, you’ll likely find that you end up cooking for yourself more often—without even realizing it!

• If you make trips to the grocery store more frequently, you’ll reduce your food waste.

  • This may not work for everyone, depending on where you live. But the essence of it is simple: buy less food at once, and you’ll have less food to waste. You’ll also put less pressure on yourself to make everything in your fridge before it goes bad. Again, when you face a full fridge as just one person, the cooking process is often motivated by a sense of guilt and pressure, rather than enjoyment. If you buy fewer things more frequently however, you’ll develop a different relationship to the food you purchase and make. You’ll slow down, and likely become more intentional with your recipes and your shopping, letting your fridge tell you what to make rather than the other way around.

  • I’ve also started a routine for myself that whenever I make a big trip to the farmer’s market, I’ll make a list of all the ingredients I bought, and put it on the outside of my fridge. It reduces the time I stand at the refrigerator door, thinking about what to make, and it also helps me waste less because I don’t forget about the shallots at the back or the different varieties of mushrooms in my crisper drawer.

My handy-dandy fridge list!

• If you change your approach to your ingredients, you’ll end up meal prepping in a more organic way.

  • I can’t help you with the “meal prep” idea itself. It’s never been something I’m good at—it’s just not how my mind works. Instead, I let my ingredients do the meal prep for me (which I wrote about here). The essence of this is, if you let your ingredients speak to you, you’ll end up creating based on what’s in your fridge, rather than forcing yourself to buy things based on a meal plan you’ve set. (This can also go along with the goal of wasting less food!)

• If you get a new cookbook or subscribe to a new food magazine, you’ll try new recipes.

  • They say that the best writers are also great readers. Along those lines, a great way to expand your home cooking abilities is to engage in more food content! If you’re looking for new inspirations, new techniques, or new recipes, you can read more food writing, watch more food-related TV and films, subscribe to periodicals like NYT Cooking or Bon Appétit. There are some great food-related Substacks too—Andrew Zimmern, Hetty McKinnon, Ruth Reichl, and David Lebovitz all have great ones! You can even change your relationship to cookbooks, and just treat them like books! There’s nothing like cozying up on a Saturday morning with your big copy of Julia Child, and letting all the techniques and recipes inspire you.

I hope some of these approaches will help you reframe your view of cooking, and of how you intend to integrate it into your routine! This year, I have some resolutions of my own, which include: being more consistent with doing the dishes; cleaning my stove and kitchen more often; writing more newsletters for you on this Substack; and relatedly, putting less pressure on myself to always send something super long and overly-thought-out, which leads to me overthinking it, which leads to me never doing it. (Have you noticed that I’m sending out this New-Year-related-newsletter almost two weeks into January?)

And I have some things I want to continue to do, after starting to implement them in 2023 and enjoying them! In particular, I want to continue to read many, many books about food (I’ve just finished Ruth Reichl’s “Comfort Me With Apples” and Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn,” both of which I HIGHLY recommend—and I’m just starting on Alice Waters’s “You Are What You Eat”). And I want to continue to have faith in my own recipe creating and testing process, and keep sharing my ideas with you.

Thank you thank you THANK YOU for being a subscriber to this newsletter. I hope to be even more engaged with it, and you, in 2024, and I hope you continue to enjoy the writing and the recipes!!

I didn’t make a top-ten list for 2023, but if you want to take a look at my top recipes of 2022, check them out below!