AceFoodDesk – Chef, author, and food writer Kim O’Donnel explains that home cooking is serious business, but we don’t have to take it so seriously

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published:Apr.20: 2024: Civil Eats News by Lisa Held Published: April 15, 2024: A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/YouMeUs2 

The thing is, home cooking is a serious business. It is a conscious decision to turn raw ingredients into a meal to nourish ourselves and the people we love,” she wrote. “The food system is more than crops and livestock; it’s what we humans do with them.”

More than a decade later, O’Donnel believes the connections between farms, our kitchens, and sharing food around a table are even more important. In the era of DoorDash, Instacart, and QR-code menus, when eating has become increasingly digital and passive, cooking can be a revolutionary act, she said, providing an avenue for active, sensory engagement with our own nourishment. But that doesn’t mean the kitchen needs to be a realm of lofty pursuits. In fact, O’Donnel kept coming back to the opposite idea in a recent interview. To get more people cooking, she said, we need to “lower our expectations.” Instead of mastering a technique, learn basic knife skills. Instead of obsessing over a certain diet, give yourself permission to change things up.

How do you describe your approach to cooking?

We spoke to O’Donnel about these ideas, and she shared tips and tricks to turn cooking into a simple, rewarding, lifelong practice.

I am one of those people who can open up the refrigerator and figure out what we’re going to have for dinner. My husband always marvels at that. I actually get great satisfaction from scrounging and coming up with something that tastes really good. I think about what I have on hand and how I can incorporate something that might be new. And what time of year is it? I do a lot of preserving, and so I have enough crushed tomatoes in jars that I can have at least one quart a month. So, recently, I yanked one of those, and I had some beans that I had cooked a few days before. I did a sort of a riff on a minestrone, but no pasta.

I don’t think about fancy. I think about something that’s simple but feels really good in the body. I think of cooking as a practice in many ways, like any other practice that’s good for your body.

I’ve been practicing yoga for more than 20 years. And of course cooking is about the fuel for your body, but there’s also something spiritually and emotionally nurturing. One could even say that when you cook for yourself and for others, you are parenting yourself or parenting somebody.

I cook the same way, but I think a lot of people find it intimidating and feel like they need to start with a recipe. Has that been your experience with students? Is it more challenging, or does it take more practice?

Good question. I’m thinking right now about this guy named Edward Espe Brown. He is a monk, but he also wrote cookbooks. Many years ago, I interviewed him. He kept talking about this idea of letting your hands be hands. In the age of handheld devices . . . can you just be in your five physical senses? I know that may sound very woo-woo, but he was pointing to this performance anxiety that our culture has around cooking.

There’s this whole notion of “think like a chef” or “mastering the art of . . .” There’s this yearning to make it more meaningful or to feel like, “Wow, that’s a really big win, making that dish.” But you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself to recreate this thing on a weeknight when you might have worked. You might have had to pick up a kid. You might have had a really shitty day. Cookbooks are wonderful because they give us ideas and they inspire us. But are we being realistic?

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