Put in pot, cook

There is a book I should write for people like me.  That is, a book about how to cook when you need to cook a lot and don't particularly care for cooking or how food looks but do care about how healthy your food is and how it tastes.  The book would be titled "Put in pot, cook" and would basically be a bunch of recipes that entail chopping up ingredients, putting them in a pot, and cooking them.  Nothing complex, nothing that displays well, and chock full of healthy and tasty.  When my parents were teaching me how to cook they really tried to emphasize the importance of making the dinner look presentable and keeping colour in mind but it absolutely didn't take.  I will happily eat grey sludge as long as it is tasty and healthy.  I recognize that I place importance on one sense (taste) and none on another (appearance) and that this is entirely arbitrary.

The trouble with my curmudgeonly ways when it comes to food is that Wendy gets very excited about new recipes that look good.  She likes reading food blogs and buying recipe books and ends up all pumped up about a new recipe she wants me to try because it looked so delicious in the pictures.  I, on the other hand, just get irritable that I need to figure out a new recipe, keep new things stocked in my kitchen, and in general do something outside of my rut.  I *like* my rut, dammit!  I am aware that I deserve no sympathy whatsoever for my plight of having to cook new and interesting dinners once in awhile but since the internet seems mostly about having a forum to bitch about nothing...

The obvious solution to the problem is to have Wendy be the cook and me work.  She could be creative, or boring, or whatever when it comes to food and I would just be happy to have something to eat.  It is a little more complicated than that though because she cares about other things too like having a career, and doing things that matter, and getting out of the house.  Those things just don't mesh well with sitting around the house cooking.  Sitting around home building games nobody will ever play, on the other hand, has some very nice synergy with getting meals on the table in time.

Science fiction sometimes suggests that in the future we will all eat grey, featureless nutrient cubes and real food will be considered an anachronism.  Most people, I suspect, would have a lot of trouble with that and would really miss the physical experience of eating.  Not me though.  Sign me up for some food cubes and give me more time to do things!