To cookbook or not cookbook?

My grandmother is a fantastic cook. People have driven many miles just to eat biscuits at her house. (If anyone wants to know why you would go out of your way for biscuits, when you can get them at the drive-thru, then you have obviously never eaten an actual biscuit.) My grandmother does not use a recipe when she makes biscuits. She doesn't use a recipe when she makes much of anything. She has one or two cookbooks somewhere in her kitchen, but they don't get opened very often. I have lots of cookbooks that get opened regularly. About 85 at last count. I have also downloaded countless recipes from the Internet, and I regularly check out cookbooks from Parkland's vast library collection. I make pretty good biscuits, too, and even though I always use the same recipe, I still have to double-check the measurements every time. Part of this is that my memory has become defective a decade or two early, but mostly it is because I don't make them that often, while my grandmother has made them every day for most of her life.

My grandmother has a whole series of dishes that she makes regularly, depending on what time of year it is, what is on sale at the grocery store that week, and what she likes to eat. She makes her shopping list, goes to the store, and that's it, she has everything she needs for the week. When I am planning what to cook for dinner tonight (never mind the rest of the week), I flip through cookbooks and troll the Internet looking for something that will catch my eye and excite my palate.

This is not necessarily a terrible way to plan dinner, but too often, it leads to unplanned trips to the grocery store and late-night dining. There are dishes or meals that I make regularly, but I don't have a discrete set of recipes to cycle through each week or month. I could, but for some reason I refuse. I don't want to have stir-fry just because it's Tuesday or roast beef because it's Thursday. This means that I spend Tuesday and Thursday, and many other days standing in the kitchen staring into the pantry or rifling through cookbooks, wishing that I knew what to cook.

When I cook for myself, it doesn't matter what I make, and I am content to assemble whatever I find in the kitchen in some edible fashion. When I am cooking for more than one, as I usually am now, I feel pressured to do something more interesting and inspired. I have no idea why, since my husband was happily living on oatmeal and bagels before I took over the kitchen. Sometimes when I am trying to decide what to cook, I become paralyzed by the endless options available to me. My husband frequently rescues me from this state by announcing that he is going to cook dinner, after which he proceeds swiftly and painlessly to make something that may not be the meal of my dreams, but is something that I am quite content to call dinner.

I have (more or less) stopped buying cookbooks for the time being. I am still tempted, but then I think guiltily of the many untested recipes cluttering my bookshelves and I resist. I mean, how many recipes do I really need? Do I actually want to eat something different every day of my life? I have spent weeks eating little more than beans and tortillas, supplemented with a few fresh veggies and the occasional can of tuna, and been extremely satisfied. As long as the food tastes good, I will be happy, so why this pressure to have new and exciting food every day? Have I been watching too many cooking shows, reading too many cooking magazines? Those guys have to generate new content and recipes, because they have a product to sell. I just want to have dinner. It's like buying new clothes every week and then standing in front of the closet complaining that I have nothing to wear.

In the interest of eating dinner regularly and before my preferred bedtime, I have posted a list of fourteen dinner recipes on the refrigerator. That is two weeks' worth. I don't have to use them, but I can. I can also add to the list, remove things from the list, or ignore it completely. If I actually do manage to plan dinner based on new and exciting recipes, great, if not, I can at least eat food that I know I like. I might even make some of those standards often enough that I can finally be like my grandmother and ignore the idea of recipes altogether.