Cooking

Last week I decided to learn how to cook.

Not because I had to, not because somebody told me to, not because I wanted to save money. The kitchen has always pulled me in, honestly. When I was younger I used to bake cakes with my mom, make lemonade, just mess around with food. I never really learned to do it independently though. Cooking was always something happening around me rather than something I was doing myself. My dad cooked. I ate the food.

For some reason I kept waiting for somebody to teach me. Then I realized that was stupid and I was not going to wait anymore.

Nobody taught me how to code. Nobody sat me down and gave me a roadmap. I opened an editor, started building things, broke stuff, and figured it out. I decided to do the same thing with cooking. So I walked into the kitchen and started making things.

It Is Not That Hard

The first thing I learned is that cooking is significantly easier than most people make it seem. Not effortless, not automatic, but way more approachable than I expected going in. The most complicated thing I had cooked before this week was pasta, and I had kind of forgotten how to do even that.

The bigger challenge is not skill. It is patience and willingness to get dirty.

• You have to spend time preparing ingredients and actually waiting for things to cook
• Your hands get dirty, the counter gets dirty, dishes pile up
• Things take longer than expected, almost always
• Good food rarely happens instantly

That sounds obvious but I think it reflects something real about how modern life works. We are trained to expect immediate results. Press a button and food arrives. Open an app and entertainment appears. Search something and the answer is there in a second. Cooking refuses to work that way. You cannot rush a potato that needs to roast. You cannot skip the process and still get the result. The reward is directly connected to the effort, and I actually found that refreshing.

What I Made

Over the past week I cooked every day. Sometimes the same things, but I learned from each attempt and the second or third version always tasted better than the first.

• Poached eggs
• French omelette
• Chicken breast
• Cinnamon sweet potatoes
• Roasted vegetables
• Asparagus
• Homemade tzatziki
• Pasta
• Protein mousse
• Breakfast bowl

I am still nowhere near being a great cook. I have barely started. But that is exactly what makes it exciting.

The Wins

One of my first real wins was the poached eggs. I had always put them in the mental category of things only experienced cooks could make. They seemed complicated and delicate and easy to ruin. Then I made them and they worked, and that moment of realizing something I built up in my head as hard was actually just fine kept repeating itself throughout the week.

Same thing with the chicken breast. I had convinced myself it was difficult when it mostly just required paying attention and following a few basic principles.

The meal that genuinely surprised me the most though was the cinnamon sweet potatoes with chicken breast and avocado. Simple ingredients, nothing fancy, but it was honestly one of the best meals I have eaten in a long time. Not because I made it, it genuinely just tasted incredible. The cinnamon on the sweet potatoes specifically is something I did not expect to hit that well.

The Failures

Not everything worked. I tried making a protein pancake I found online.

It burned. Completely flopped. Looked nothing like the picture, tasted worse. And ironically that failure made the whole week more enjoyable because it reminded me of learning anything else. Coding, writing, photography, fitness, it does not matter. Mistakes are part of the process. You improve by doing, not by watching.

I have learned this lesson so many times at this point that I should probably stop needing to relearn it, but here we are.

Food Is More Than Macros

Before this week, food was mostly just nutrition to me. Calories, protein, carbs, fat. I still care about all of that, it matters to me, but I understand something else now.

Technique matters. Temperature matters. How you season things and at what point in the process matters more than I realized. Especially with vegetables, the same vegetable can taste completely different depending on how it is cooked, at what temperature, and when you eat it. Something that seems boring can become genuinely good with surprisingly small changes.

That realization also made me think about something that I find kind of backwards. People spend serious money eating food someone else prepared, often food that is not even good for them, while convincing themselves that healthy food is bland or difficult to make. I increasingly think that belief is just wrong. Some of the best food I ate this week came from my own kitchen with simple ingredients I bought myself.

The Best Recipe: Protein Mousse

The best thing I made all week is also the simplest. I have been eating this every day.

Ingredients:

• 170g non-fat Greek yogurt
• 0.5 tbsp cocoa powder
• 0.5 tbsp honey
• A lot of cinnamon, seriously do not be shy with it
• 1 tsp instant coffee
• A tiny splash of Fairlife milk

Instructions:

1. Add everything to a blender or use an immersion blender in a bowl
2. Blend until completely smooth, it should be thick and mousse-like
3. Taste and adjust the sweetness or cinnamon
4. Refrigerate for 15-30 minutes if you want a thicker texture, though it is great immediately too

That is it. Takes maybe two minutes, tastes significantly better than most high-protein desserts I have ever bought, and the macros are clean. The coffee and cinnamon together with the cocoa is what makes it work.

What This Actually Changed

Learning to cook also made me appreciate my dad more. He cooks every week and I never fully understood the work involved until I spent time doing it myself. At the same time I also realized it is not as hard as I assumed, which is its own kind of lesson.

I used to eat prepped food from my dad and just optimize around that. Now I can cook myself, which does not mean I will stop eating what he makes, but it means I have options. I can hit my nutrition goals without infinitely optimizing portions someone else calculated. I feel more independent because of it.

Cooking is also something I can compare to coding, and the comparison is interesting. Learning to code is so much harder. Cooking you can figure out mostly by trying, by getting into the kitchen and doing it. Code is harder, the feedback loops are slower, the mental models take longer to build. And yet shipping something in code is more satisfying in a way that cooking just cannot match, it is not even close. I am not sure why I keep thinking about this comparison but the difference is real.

What cooking and coding do share though is that I do not learn by someone teaching me. I learn by doing. I learn by trying things, failing, adjusting, and trying again. This week was just another confirmation of something I already knew about myself. I cooked every day, sometimes the same dishes, sometimes new ones, and each attempt taught me something the previous one did not.

Why Is This Not More Common

Honestly I do not fully understand why more people never learn to cook. Clean, simple, delicious food is not that hard to make. My theory is that it is mostly laziness and following what everyone else does. Most people watch others cook rather than doing it themselves. Most people just order food or buy prepped meals because it is easier. I think that is the same pattern that keeps people from building things, from writing, from learning skills that are actually not that hard once you start.

Everyone should learn to cook. Not to become a chef, not to obsess over nutrition, but because it is one of the most practical forms of independence available. The ability to feed yourself well is a surprisingly powerful thing. It gives you options, confidence, and control over something fundamental.

What Is Next

I am planning to cook ground beef this week and make burgers at some point with 93/7 beef and low fat cheddar. I also want to keep improving the dishes I already know, because the second and third versions are always better than the first.

The cooking is going to continue. It started as something I wanted to try and became a genuine hobby faster than I expected. That does not happen often.

There is something else I want to be honest about. I have been taking time away from startup work lately. I am bored of that space right now in a way that I think is healthy. The Ryva days were real, they meant something, and I miss that feeling of building something that mattered. But I have not found the next thing to solve yet. I have been writing down problems I live every day, things that frustrate me, trying to find something worth building again. It has not clicked yet and I am not going to force it.

Cooking has been a good thing to do during this time. It is real, it is physical, it produces something you can eat. Sometimes you need that.

When I find the problem I will know. Until then I am going to keep cooking, keep writing, and stop pretending I need to be building something right now.

The best tasting things I made this week were the protein mousse, the breakfast bowl, and the cinnamon sweet potatoes. If you try any of them, start with the mousse.