the concept of lentils

batch cooking and cooking your feelings

I made a meal today, just for myself. I ate some, and then put the rest into two reused takeaway containers, and put those in the freezer.

This doesn’t seem very significant, but it’s the first time I’ve batch cooked for myself since my divorce last autumn. Between then and now, I haven’t felt able to cook anything more complex than an occasional pasta with pesto. I’ve avoided death by scurvy through getting food from my local community kitchen in return for my organising labour, my generous foodie flatmate, and making cooking into a date activity. It’s not that I don’t know how to cook - I do. There was just something in my brain that said I couldn’t. Perhaps it was a reaction to the upheaval of leaving, a practical manifestation of emotional burnout. It went beyond the act of cooking itself - for a while, I couldn’t even make decisions or form desires about what kind of food I wanted. I just needed to eat without having to think about it at all.

I wasn’t happy with not feeling able to cook for myself or think much about food for nine months. I love food. And I’m not much of a prepping enthusiast if I can’t even batch cook, am I? But I know my brain by now. It’s been 33 years, and I finally have a sense of how it works. I cannot summon motivation from nowhere. I cannot bully myself into anything. If I want to change something about the way I live, I can’t force things from the top down - the conditions have to change. I didn’t know how to change the conditions for this one, but I knew I couldn’t force it. I slowly took the glimmers of motivation where they came - an occasional drive to make something nice with someone I care about, a momentary flash of inspiration to sneak some vegetables into my pasta pesto. But I took them as they came, didn’t try to make them into anything more than they were. I tried to have faith that I’d be able to do it when I was ready.

I’ve just been travelling for a month, which I’m incredibly lucky to have been able to do. I got a little money in my divorce, and used some of it to get myself an interrail pass. This is an opportunity I’m endlessly grateful for, but I’m not rich enough to travel with any degree of luxury, so I’ve spent a month in hostels. It turns out there is a reason that interrailing is usually considered a pursuit for the young - hostels are not for the creaky of joints. They’re also not for the faint-hearted if you want to try to cook anything. Apart from one exception (hello, Bergen!), the kitchens were usually either far too cramped and busy, or upsettingly sticky, or both. So I mostly spent the month eating things that took as little preparation as possible - mostly cup-shaped meals that only required adding boiling water - with no community kitchen, flatmate or cooking dates to compensate.

In the general fatigue fog after I got back from travelling three days ago, one thought stood out clearly: I need vegetables. How can I get vegetables? I thought about my usual trick of sneaking some veg into my pasta and pesto, but that didn’t feel adequate. If not pot noodles, if not pasta, then what? My mind alighted on the concept of lentils. I remembered a cookbook I’d used a lot before I got divorced, with a good lentil dhal in it. I used to cook batches and batches of it, using it in different ways, some recommended by the cookbook, some of my own. I remembered there were other things in that cookbook that I’d liked, that I could make really well. All this felt as if it was suddenly being revealed to me, discovered at the back of a cupboard which had previously been locked. It felt like I was finally ready.

I hadn’t taken the cookbook with me when I left, so I ordered myself another copy. I went to the kitchen and realised that my flatmate’s saucepans were too small to make a big batch of dhal, so I made half a batch on Thursday, and another half batch today. I shared some and ate some and kept some. It felt good. It tasted good.

I marvel at the capacity of the brain to withhold information and then release it. I had totally forgotten how good it feels to decide you want to eat something, get what you need to make it, make it, and eat it. That process, which felt intolerably complex and draining to me before, now feels possible. Is this my mind telling me I’m recovering from the burnout? Did my craving for vegetables get so intense it precipitated a dramatic mental shift? Which way does the causality run? I do not know. I do not mind. Some things can’t be prepped for, at least not in the way that you think.