What to Do When You’re Just Bored with Food

If you feel like you’re in a cooking rut, apparently, you’re not alone. In a recent article in the New Yorker, author Helen Rosner wrote an essay entitled “The Joylessness of Cooking.” And The New York Times’ Sam Sifton, while not going so far as to call meal preparation “joyless,” this week wrote about getting beyond the sameness of meals these days.

So don’t feel bad about the boredom. First of all, it’s natural. Cookbook author Deb Perelman points out that people have a staple flavor palate that they tend to follow without thinking: it’s what your taste buds like best. To fix it, you need to figure out what those flavors are.

As for me, I’ve found that many of my recipes have a similar Mediterranean-flavor profile: a base of onions and garlic, some thyme or oregano, and then vegetables and protein, whether meat or beans.  It’s easy to fall into a rhythm if you’re cooking seven days a week, and when getting a meal on the table trumps searching for something creative. What’s a home cook to do? Here are some ideas.

Find one new recipe each week

I try to do something different each night, which means I’m exploring new ideas all the time. See my Menu of the Week section. I recognize that’s not going to work for a lot of people, but you can take a look at it for ideas. Finding a new recipe you like could be one of the few pleasures you can experience these days. Web sites such as Epicurious, My Recipes, and Food and Wine offer a daily e-mail of recipe ideas that are usually tailored to ingredients that are seasonally available. Most newspapers feature a weekly food section, typically on Wednesdays; the Newburyport Daily News contains a supplement insert Relish featuring seasonal recipes. The New York Times Sunday Magazine includes an “Eat” section that I always find beautifully written and with a different twist on cuisine. A lot of periodicals include good recipes that you might have missed; Yankee Magazine comes to mind, for recipes with a New England bent that are also available online.

Make a favorite dish from your childhood

I recently planned to make soup after a meal of roast chicken. Then I decided to amp it up with homemade Pennsylvania Dutch egg noodles, just like my mother used to make for my favorite childhood dish. It was well worth the extra effort. If you don’t have that favored recipe, maybe your mother or brother or aunt can help. And there are those good old community cookbooks that can point you in an interesting direction.

Peruse a cookbook or cooking magazine for ideas

Maybe you have favorite cookbooks or back issues of cooking magazines to return to, both for a reminder of past wonderful meals and for recipes you overlooked, or even a forgotten file box or online folder of saved recipes. I love just reading The Food of Spain by Claudia Roden for ideas. The web site CKBK.com offers an economical subscription that allows access to more than 300 digitized cookbooks. It was the source of some great regional Indian recipes that we recently enjoyed.

Try a new “taste”

Why not get out of your old staple flavor palate and try something different? For example, Central African cuisine has some interesting spice mixtures since it was a critical stop in the Spice Road trade. Forget the standard Italian herbs. Imagine a pasta sauce, beef stew, or a rice pilaf seasoned with a spice blend that includes cumin, coriander, cardamom, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and a stick of cinnamon. Trust me. Those dishes from Somalia and Ethiopia are fantastic.

For a break in the routine, you can always order takeout, and that’s an important way to support local restaurants. But you can’t do that for every dinner. Trying something new and different always works for me.

How about you? How do you overcome “same stuff; different day” in the kitchen? And what have you discovered? Please share with a comment below.

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