The Mythbusters’ motto is, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. I understood this on a molecular level. Granted the things I’m overdoing don’t involve blowing up hot water heaters, but the same principle applies. Unfortunately, life recently decided it was not only going to get in the way but completely derail all my plans and I realized there was nothing left to do. I had to scale back.
In the end of May, I underwent surgery. Which, I thought wasn’t going to be major surgery, but when I arrived at the surgical center found out that it was indeed termed major surgery. My plan to give myself only a week off from cooking already looked bleak.
Surgery went fine. But two days later my sweet cat, Nova, passed away and I was absolutely destroyed. Cooking wasn’t even registering in my list of priorities. We ended up eating out and having pre-prepared meals from Aldi way more than anyone intended and I couldn’t have cared less.
Finally, earlier this week I realized I was sick of eating out, sick of packaged food, but the thought of cooking from scratch made me want to cry. I decided this called for scaling back.
I came up with some recipes using just one protein: bacon. We already had 3 lbs of it when I tried to cook the previous week and I literally made nothing on the entire menu. This time, I focused on simple foods that we all liked and were easy to prepare.
I started with a basic cobb salad. I even told myself I didn’t even need to line the ingredients up the way a cobb is usually presented. But I ended up doing anyway it because I was having so much fun preparing the different ingredients.
Then I tackled a bacon quiche as I was getting extremely fatigued of the packaged breakfast foods I was eating. It was a new quiche recipe for me. Who knows what happened to my previous one? But it was quick to put together and I used a pre-made pie crust.
I also made chicken, bacon, ranch quesadillas and bacon cheese burgers. I did not get photos of these as we were entirely too hungry to pause for a photoshoot before eating. They were great, though!
Although I scaled back out of desperation, it reminded me of a great deal. Mainly that food certainly doesn’t have to be complex to be enjoyable. Also, while it can be great to challenge myself and learn new recipes and techniques, sometimes it’s just nice to have a tasty quesadilla for dinner and not make all the dishes dirty in the process.
