> Then I started learning to cook while intensely focusing on reducing recipes to their bare essentials. This is really interesting and it's very much an under

> Then I started learning to cook while intensely focusing on reducing recipes to their bare essentials. This is really interesting and it's very much an under-appreciated discipline in cookery. Despite the whole nouvelle cuisine thing which fetishises it. There's no reason a meal has to have loads of ingredients or loads of steps; both of these things put people off thinking they can ever learn to cook. And despite a lot of ill-advised dogma there's no reason any particular individual meal needs to be nutritionally complete unto itself; you don't have to worry so much about X amount of protein, Y amount of starch in each and every main meal, as long as the meals you make for yourself average out as good enough. I think at some level we self-sabotage and deliberately overcomplicate what we expect from our own cookery, or build up a need for food tradition or cookery as a traditional role for just one person in a family, as an excuse not to do it at all. It's like deciding against playing guitar because you'll never be Hendrix.