Strained relations with your kitchen? Try a cooking challenge

AUSTIN, Texas -- Cooking at home isn't an Olympic feat, but even dedicated home cooks have to admit: Eating convenience and restaurant foods is easy. A little too easy.

Frozen and prepared meals are getting healthier and more artisan by the minute, and so are the grab-and-go meals from the market by your office. Tacos on every corner can feel irresistible. For $5, you can buy ingredients and cook food for yourself, or you can pay to not think about making your own food. No wonder many of us are increasingly choosing the latter.

But what happens when we make that choice so often that we forget to think to make a frittata, or a pasta sauce, or a soup, or a loaf of homemade bread?

I fall into culinary ruts as often as the next mom of two elementary school students. The kids come home from school and are ready for dinner by 4:30 p.m. I'm often trying to work and make them food at the same time, and there's little guarantee that they'll be willing to try that new recipe I recently flagged in a magazine.

These are the conditions that brought me to take on this month's (hashtag)30atHome challenge, a grassroots movement started by my friend Martha Pincoffs to encourage people to find new solutions to whatever home cooking hurdles they face.

For most of the people who participated, it wasn't about cooking 90 meals in a month but rather trying new techniques and recipes or new shopping strategies, using up leftovers, making time to cook and eat with others or establishing a better meal planning routine.

I dabbled in each of those over the past 30 days. I enjoyed the freshest, brightest tasting broccolini and cauliflower from East Austin farms. I attended a food swap to make new friends with fellow cooks who were also taking the challenge. I made lists of leftovers, freezer supplies, recipes I wanted to make and ingredients I needed from shopping trips to specific stores.

I spent one Sunday morning in the Central Market bulk section, measuring hard-to-find and new-to-me spices to add to my spice cabinet and smelling teas I knew I'd enjoy while baking yet another loaf of no-knead bread. I pulled cookbooks off the shelf that I hadn't used in years and made a concerted effort to not only flag recipes but actually buy the ingredients to make them.

There were a few cheat days. Frozen pizzas, a trio of work lunches and one day of office breakfast tacos provided a little relief from the weight of all those dishes. But I also found myself baking desserts almost once a week, dishes be darned.

Each week, this process of picking recipes and realistically planning when I'd want to make and eat them got easier. I wrote the dishes I wanted to make on little sticky notes that could be moved to another day on the calendar if needed, and each week, I took stock of the leftovers and how the week went. It's amazing what sitting down for 15 minutes at the kitchen table with a stack of cookbooks by your side can do for your creativity.

In the end, those moments of joy are what I knew would await me if I took a few weeks to make a commitment to work on my relationship with cooking. I think it worked.

Addie Broyles writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: abroyles(at)statesman.com.

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