"Can't Cook, Won't Cook"

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Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 5 February 1996". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020.

Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 22 December 1995". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020. Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 10 May 1996". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020. After four months of living alone, I have learned that I cannot be without Greek yoghurt, kale, cannellini beans, peanut butter, sour cream, chilli flakes, spinach and frozen chapati breads.Since my kitchen awakening, however, I have had friends for dinner once or twice a week. I rarely make anything fancy – just a bowl of stew or pasta, or daal eaten on our laps on the sofa; delicious and nourishing – but this is something I would not have thought I’d ever be comfortable doing. Either way, it is important to find a source that resonates with you. Cooks who wrote lyrically of textures and smells, or who saw every meal as a social celebration, actually reaffirmed my view that I wasn’t refined or gregarious enough to enjoy cooking.

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes that behaviour change starts with identity change. To create new habits, “you need to start believing new things about yourself”. Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 20 November 1995". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020.Practising my cooking felt a bit like practising my French with a native speaker who is also fluent in English: insisting on imposing my incompetence on others, at the expense of everyone’s enjoyment.

Can't Cook, Won't Cook - BBC One London - 2 February 1996". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 6 June 2020.I think we always underestimate our capacity for change,” says Signe Johansen, author of Solo: The Joy of Cooking for One. “But it is life-affirming to think: ‘I’m capable of adapting and evolving.’” Raise the stakes With attitudes to food shaped in childhood, these retrograde ideas can be insidious. The novelist Hanya Yanagihara recently said that she “deliberately never learned” to cook as a teenager for fear of being trapped in the domestic sphere; I suspect my own historical resistance was similar. But it is exhilarating to realise that your identity is not fixed. Start by deciding that you can cook, “then prove it to yourself with small wins”, writes Clear. Iyer, who describes herself as “not really a leftovers gal”, looks for ways to make them into a different meal – for instance, by turning odds and ends into a rissole.