Daily glamor

Often, it feels like maybe too often, I struggle with dinner. Planning it and cooking it seems like an impossible task, and it feels like we're having soup again. Or dang, another overpriced cold delivered pizza. It used to feel so good and now it feels crappy, that delivered pizza.

In order to solve my predicament, I turned to my ever friendly Google and I ask it (though "begging" is more like it) how I can, once and for all, plan our dinners. Just once a week, or less, once every few days. I've subscribed to plenty websites, I've read plenty cookbooks, but it's of no help.

And you know why is that? Because food is ingrained to the very core of who I turn out to be and where I happen to live. What to eat, how to do it and when to stuff our mouths with it in this global era, is still pretty much a business of where we live and who we are. I love meat but I find organs disgusting. I don't eat seafood. Poultry and chicken are synonyms to me. I can't eat hot spicy ingredients, or I feel my teeth are falling off. I find green vegetables boring (sigh), and I need extra encouragement in the form of mayo or mustard to plow through potatoes and other roots (double sigh). Touching raw food is unpleasant to me, and I work with spoons and spatulas and forks so I can avoid it as much as possible. Things that require many steps, like moussaka, I might adore but are way off my patience's league. I'm a grown up picky eater who would like to break the old habits, but is unsure of how to.

Reading cookbooks and recipes is exciting, but the ingredients (kale, anyone?), the proportions (is that butter?), the required accoutrements (some as silly as an oven thermometer) make most of the reading pretty close to science fiction. Or it is that I'm overwhelmed?

In the end it's just me complaining. The department of health has issued a cookbook with simple, cheap and healthy recipes with nutritional information, and in spite of the general lack of glamor and disgusting measuring terms like "1/2 package of...", it should fit my bill. But it still feels so... hard. Is it so for everybody else out there?