wherein Liz thinks about cooking and other everyday chores

[edenfalling]

I think the weirdest thing so far about having a crockpot is that I am not cooking on a day-by-day basis. Instead, I am cooking roughly a week ahead of myself. I mean, I made chicken soup on Sunday night, and I only ate the second helping of it tonight, nearly a week later. Tomorrow I will steam some broccoli and eat it with the first of two chicken thighs I baked tonight -- said thighs are the part of a multi-pack that I didn't use in the soup last weekend. And I am also in the process of making another batch of pot roast, which I will freeze Sunday morning and probably won't eat until next weekend at the earliest, because I have a lot of soup.

I mean, I've always tried to have at least a week and a half of food around, but in the past it's generally been frozen tv dinners and stuff, or a bunch of cheese and pepperoni and crackers. And right now, I still have the cheese and pepperoni and crackers -- to say nothing of some emergency ramen noodles and Campbell's soup cans and whatnot -- but I also have real, homecooked food. For hardly any effort!

It is mind-boggling how many fewer spoons cooking uses up if it's not standing directly between me and that night's dinner. It's also much easier to cook when I don't have to face standing over a hot stove -- or at least only have to sacrifice about ten minutes for chopping and steaming broccoli, because that hardly counts and I'm not trying to time it against anything other than reheating chicken in a microwave.

...

Household chores are not easy for me, in many ways. I mean, washing dishes is dead easy. It's even meditative. But pretty much everything else I manage on a very piecemeal basis, or only because I flat-out refuse to live in a world where I don't water my plants once a week, put out the recycling on designated days, and change my sheets every other week (or every three weeks, if I'm having a rough time and need to conserve spoons for other stuff). So I rarely vacuum, I dust extremely sporadically, I clean my bathroom only when I can't avoid noticing the weird black gunk around the drains, I forget to take out my trash until the kitchen starts to smell funny or I've filled up one of my smaller wastebaskets with tissues, I ignore a lot of my mail that isn't immediately relevant bills, etc.

I'm not proud of this. I would like to be more organized and mindful of basic living standards. But that type of task requires a lot of spoons for me to start. Momentum carries me through fairly well once I've begun, but there is a shit-ton of inertia to overcome before I hit a groove.

Anyway, crockpots do a LOT to reduce the inertia barrier to cooking, and I am duly grateful.

Comments

[redwolf]

With the cleaning stuff, I think you're either wired to give a toss or you're not, but society still insists you should be even when you're aren't and then you feel guilty.

Provided your place doesn't look like a frat or hoarder lives there, you're perfectly normal. You will drive people from the more anal side of the housekeeping scale insane, but look on that as entertainment.

I fall on your side of the scale.

[edenfalling]

It is not the tidiest apartment in the world, but you can sit on all the chairs (...well, except the one I dumped my non-foldable laundry on tonight since I didn't feel like sorting it and shoving it into the appropriate drawers) and there is usable counter space in the kitchen and bathroom. Mostly it's just kind of dusty, and there's a lot of paper clutter lying around in semi-sorted piles that I occasionally get around to filing in the relevant folders, recycling, or reading and then recycling.