I Bought a Cookbook

Over the past year, my eating habits have gotten bad. My wife has been the primary cook in our household, with me taking care of dinner two-three nights a week. However, over the past year, the amount of cooking she does has slowed down significantly due to her working three jobs. This has left me to pick up the slack and/or pick up food from someplace.

To complicate matters, my wife has a beef and pork allergy, which means the number of restaurants we have to choose from is limited. We not only have to avoid beef and pork products, but also be mindful of cross-contamination. That means we eat a lot of Zaxbys and Chickfila.

I have grown tired of eating out and eating the same things all the time. While I’m a capable cook and can follow a recipe, I really only have ten or so dishes I tend to pull from. I’ve packed on some pounds this year due to our eating habits, and I really want that to change. I need to lose some weight, but I really just want to eat something different because I’m just so sick of having spent the past year or so eating pretty much the same ten or fifteen things.

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching Game of Thrones and there is a scene involving rabbit stew. That’s not something we can eat (the whole beef/pork allergy is actually a mammalian allergy) but I thought a nice bowl of chicken stew sounded great. I’m not a huge soup or stew guy, and that was part of the appeal. It was something different!

So, like everyone else, I typed “simple chicken stew recipe” in DuckDuckGo and hit search. What a mistake that was.

Pages upon pages of recipes popped up. Some were identical, some drastically different, some were reviewed well and others had comments to improve the taste. It was all too much. I began digging through these pages, cross-referencing with reddit and YouTube, trying to avoid spices I don’t care for, while also trying to find the best chicken stew recipe. I mean, if I’m going to go through all this trouble, I certainly want it to be tasty.

I began bookmarking chicken stew recipes, and before I knew it, three days had passed, and I had seventeen saved chicken stew recipes, but I had not eaten any chicken stew.

My wife and I made a trip to the thrift store, where I found a Betty Crocker cookbook from the 90’s. It had a little bit of everything in it, including a simple chicken stew recipe. I gladly paid two dollars for the book and I went home and made chicken stew. It was a great.

There was a time when the internet was superior (or at least it felt that way) than books. But with the amount of misinformation and SEO/AI trash online, I feel like trusting a book for my information is the better deal these days. It cuts down on the clutter and gets things back to the basics. In a way, it’s much easier than the internet, which is funny because having all of this information at our fingertips was supposed to be easy.

At one point in time, the internet was great for searching for information. Of course, you’d have options, but you wouldn’t be overwhelmed with them the way you are today. Curation is key and until we can find a way to do that, I’m thinking I’m going to rely more on books to find answers to my questions.