Yum Yuck

I have a ravenous appetite for good food, but I have a love/hate relationship with cooking.

It's a whole bunch of things. I love eating out. One of the greatest things about living in this city is the endless cache of excellent food options. In the last five or six years that I've been living downtown, I've been spoiled with boundless access to a variety of eclectic food options. Feel like Vietnamese? Italian? Turkish? Lebanese? Italian? Comfort food? Poutine? Japanese pub food? Portuguese? There's almost no limit to the good food that's on my doorstep. If I had a bottomless wallet, I could eat in a different restaurant every day for a month and never repeat a dish, if I wanted to. Probably way longer than that.

I love being in restaurants. I love people watching. I love food. Good food. I'm drooling right now.

But... eating out is costly, and unfortunately, when you become an adult, you end up with a lot of other more important things to spend your money on. Fun things like car payments, gas, insurance, rent or mortgage payments, condo fees, utilities, repaying student loans for some. At a certain point, you have to cut back. Eating out so often just isn't as easy as it was before.

The thing is... I don't really love cooking. It's not that I can't cook, because I can. It's just a huge effort every time, even when I'm cooking something simple. I also have "chef's stomach", which means I'll be craving something like crazy, but after spending time making it, I just don't want it anymore. I often struggle through meal preparation and finally sit down to eat, exhausted and prone to just shovelling it all in because I'm so done with food already. The following day, I open the fridge and look at the leftovers and think "I so don't want to eat that right now." I know, some people love leftovers - even prefer leftovers, but I'm just wired in a way to want to eat something different for. every. meal.

I imagine it to be easier when you're cooking for a family. It's easier to manage your ingredients when you're not the only one eating them. Jean and I don't live together, and on the nights when I'm eating alone, I find myself with an excess of herbs and vegetables that I can't get around to using before they go bad. Hell, we have trouble managing these things when we're together. Having no obligation to or routine of putting food on the table for other people on a regular basis makes me feel less motivated to spend time in the kitchen.

If I had a love for cooking, these things probably wouldn't be an issue. But I don't like being in the kitchen. Being in the kitchen feels like a job to me, it's exhausting. Jean and I also don't really have overlapping palettes in the sense that I tend to prefer strong, interesting flavours. I automatically like all asian foods, for example, and while he likes it, it's not his preference. Finding meals that we both like has been an exercise in frustration -- mostly for me -- but it's getting better.

So, we're trying. My eating out has cut down by about 75% and I've even actually been bringing my lunch from home at work half the week! Don't get me started about how big of a deal this is to me, and how depressed I often feel when I'm eating leftovers or sandwiches at my desk.

It's an uphill battle, but it will all be worth it when we figure it all out and have healthier and less costly eating habits.