For Those Who Finds Cooking Bothersome: Tips to Keep Going with Ease

Sometimes you have to prepare three meals per day for your family. Most of you must have found it bothersome to cook, or even to think about what to cook at least once in your life.
Working in the kitchen every day, hiding your true feeling of gloom will make cooking even more painful. How can we cope with this negative feeling to avoid falling into a vicious cycle?

In this feature, we asked Kawase Rina, a cooking specialist and food coordinator, about the mindset to get through the daily chore of meal preparation without too much pain, and for tips on effortless cooking.

If you find it hard to prepare meals, let go of the “bother.”

Ideally, you should prepare meals that are delicious and good for the body, but that’s too much of a bother… You think about what’s for supper, go shopping to a supermarket, cook a meal and wash the dishes. Just thinking about the process of meal preparation makes you feel disgusted…
How can we calm our heart that’s crying out “What a bother!” and get along with the daily routine of meal preparation?

Rina suggests that many of us consider cooking as a bother because we feel compelled to prepare a “decent” meal and the perceived level of “decency” is too high.

“‘I have to prepare a nutritionally balanced meal for my family, and to that end, I am supposed to make it all on my own without depending on ready-to-eat or frozen food.’ I think it’s this kind of perfectionism that puts too much pressure on you.Cooking as a household chore is all the more burdensome because it is required every day, unlike cooking as a hobby that you enjoy from time to time. We might as well take it easy, but taking it easy gives us guilty feelings.

Kawase Rina, answering our questions online.

“If you find it hard to prepare meals,” says Rina,“try to “let go of the bother.”

“Let go of the sense of responsibility that tells you to live for someone else, and the concept of an ideal family dinner. Absolving yourself is the first step to setting yourself free. Even your family will be much happier when you are in a good humor, even if you ‘cut some corners.’”
If you are the one who prepare meals every day, I advise you to take care of yourself more than anything else. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use the time saved by curtailing your cooking routine for something to care about your mental and physical health?

Rina listed three concrete steps to let go of the bother:

・ Use retort or frozen food to add a dish.
・ Keep ready-to-eat foodstuffs in the fridge like natto or mekabu.
・ Talk to your mind and body to determine “what I can do today,” and do not try to do something extra.”

“Meals should be something enjoyable by nature. Don’t be fussy about the process or ingredients. Celebrate yourself for having prepared a meal, instead.”

Seven is a lucky number.

Deciding on what dishes to prepare is one of the hurdles to be cleared in cooking. Cooking every day often puts you in a rut, with the result that you don’t know what to make anymore.

So, we asked Rina what’s on her mind when deciding on what’s for dinner.

“Even if it’s easy to decide on the main dish, like meat, fish, or egg, it’s hard to think of accompaniments. I make it a rule to consider seven categories of ingredients.

Those categories are made up of typical ingredients in Japanese cooking that are good for your health:

Beans including natto, tofu, fried tofu, miso and other processed soybean foods;
Nuts including sesame, groundnut, walnut and gingko nut;
Seaweeds including brown seaweed, laver, kelp and mozuku;
Vegetables including green and yellow vegetables, other regularly available vegetables, root crops and seasonal vegetables;
Fish including horse mackerel, common mackerel, sardine, octopus and clams;
Mushrooms including shiitake, brown beech mushroom, Pleurotus eryngii and velvet shank;
Potatoes including sweet potato and taro.

“If fish is to be the main dish for the evening, for example, buy fish at a local supermarket, and then think of accompaniments using other categories of ingredients.”

Timesaving gadgets and favorite seasonings to make cooking happier and easier.

Your hectic daily life surely makes you want to spend as little time as possible on cooking. Buying timesaving gadgets and making good use of seasonings are two of the things that Rina has adopted to curtail the time spent on cooking.
We asked her to elaborate.

Using timesaving gadgets

A self-declared addict of timesaving gadgets, Rina cites two of them – Bunbun Chopper, an easy-to-handle mincing device, and silicon spoon, a multi-functional cooking device capable of mixing and dishing out, for example – as regulars in her kitchen.

“You should also let go of the compulsive idea that cooking deserves time and effort. If you are not even in a mood to use fire in the kitchen, you can simply use a microwave-safe bowl to prepare your meal with an oven.

Making good use of seasonings

Rather than combining various seasonings, using a single seasoning that can do the trick helps you shorten the time required for cooking to a considerable extent. Now that we have a wide variety of seasoning available in market, you might as well enjoy searching for seasonings capable of producing your favorite tastes.

“My suggestion is to have a seasoning, other than soy sauce, to upgrade chilled tofu, sliced onion, or avocado into a standalone dish. It might come in handy when you need another accompaniment.”

Additional dish straight from the oven!

Finally, here are some of the recipes from Rina’s book titled Absolute Microwave Oven: Microwaving Recipes to Save Your Time(Bungeishunju), a collection of convenient recipes using a microwave oven to add another dish to the table. They will surely help you save time and effort when you are exhausted from work and childcare!

Boiled Napa Cabbage and Bacon à la China

Photo: Takashi Shimizu