Too Good At Cooking
On the psychology of not being able to lower your standards
I was looking at pictures of buffets on Google reviews the other day. I’m the buffet guy, after all. There’s a new one opening up in Rockville, Maryland at the end of July. There are two new made-to-order all-you-can-eat sushi joints in Northern Virginia, in Vienna and Sterling. Last year, one of the first new Chinese buffets in awhile opened up a little past Annandale.
The food may not be quite what it used to be—I haven’t truly had a pre-COVID buffet experience since 2021. I’ve spent more time than I should trying to figure out what exactly is different. Is it the food? Is it me? Is it hard to get excited about unlimited cheap Chinese food when you’re conscious that a million of your fellow citizens are dead? Or did all that just subtly just change the way businesses operate? Am I perceiving an actual change, or assuming a change in my own perception of things is something external?
But the pictures look the same, anyway. They look good. And I look at them and think, I wish I wanted this.
But I don’t; I’m happy with my own cooking, in my own home. It’s curious how it’s difficult to tell the difference between contentment and depression; between contentment and apathy.
Now before you worry about me, another factor here is that I got much better at cooking during the pandemic. I’ve written about that here a fair bit; cooking and everything that goes into it—the budgeting, the craft, the creativity, the sense of making something more than the sum of its parts—is really enjoyable to me. Not unlike writing in way, if you think about it. And I love the feeling of saving money, using down time to do something useful, and just actually running a household to some extent.
I remember reading a comment on a blog once, to the effect of, lots of people really don’t know how to “make a home.” You could quibble with that, and argue over what it means, but I want to be one of those people who does—I want our kids to grow up in the kind of homes we remember growing up in.
When I say I got pretty good at cooking, I mean something like this:
Or this:
The downside of being good at something, though, is that you become discriminating. Your standards are forced up. So when I look at those buffet pictures and think, “Yeah, $20 for a bunch of over-salted takeout food, what’s the point?” I kind of miss being bad enough at cooking that that stuff seemed amazing. I miss being able to be impressed by a randomly chosen restaurant instead of being disappointed and critical: Yeah, it’s okay, but they needed to take the broccoli off 30 seconds earlier. Eh, the sauce is a little too thin, for another minute of cooking it would be 50 percent better.
I recently started using the bones from chicken thighs to make stock (yeah, I used to just get rid of them; I know there are cooking folks who’d be horrified by that). And when I make something with chicken in it that needs liquid—chicken cutlets in a wine/lemon sauce, or something—I use the chicken broth instead of water or chicken bouillon. The upside is that it tastes incredible. The downside is I feel like I can never go back.
I think a lot of people would think of this as simply being a snob. But I’m not. Really. It’s more that once you unlock the secret of something, you also take away the magic. You can see it plainly, and that feeling of being impressed is much harder to experience.
How do you enjoy paying five times the ingredient costs for a worse final result than you can do at home, on a workday? I guess the positive way to say it is, how blessed I am to have flexible enough hours and both the skill and interest in cooking to be able to “beat” lots of restaurants.
But I do kind of miss having lower standards! Am I more mature? More apathetic? Too demanding? Have you had this sort of experience, especially coming out of this weird social and economic period?
Leave a comment!
Related Reading:
Iconic Hometown Restaurant, Obsolete Dining Concept?
The Restaurant Vs. The Supermarket
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As a fellow home cook, I find that "unlocking the secret" of a recipe doesn't take away the magic for me. Rather, it gives me a sense of appreciation for what goes into good food—the technique, the selection of ingredients, the balancing of flavors, the deft seasoning. Knowing that the quality of the food I produce can vary depending on my energy, mood, or time constraints, I am also in awe of cooks and restaurants that can reliably execute with the same level of quality every day. But perhaps here's a difference: when I go out to eat, I'm not looking to be impressed; I'm looking to have a great meal, and I'm grateful for the effort that goes into it, even if I could have made it at home.
I think this is true about many things once you develop a skill. Like I just can't enjoy reading for pleasure as much now that I've written books myself, at least not in the same genres. I can perceive the machinery clanking along too clearly. And when something is less than perfect, now I know that the writer started with a blank page and had infinite choices, so why didn't they make a better choice?