Southern Style Cooking: Changing My Food Life With 15-Minute Habits

Sunday, January 2, 2022

Changing My Food Life With 15-Minute Habits

Changing My Food Life With 15-Minute Habits

Heather Ramsdell,
Senior Editorial Director

Happy New Year, and welcome to Square One!

I am pretending that I'm brand new—not broken, messy, or somehow wrong. And since I'm now perfectly fine, I don't need a New Year's resolution. I replaced my resolutions with two desires: First, to pay attention when I eat, and second, to make my kitchen, which is the heart of my home, less of a booby trap.

I'd like to do this the way my partner's mother gardens, with solitary persistence. She doesn't flail or strong-arm this garden. Instead she coaxes it over time, stonily extracting poison ivy by the roots, pinching buds, waiting for trees, timing bulbs, evicting stones, and negotiating with deer. The garden, of course, is beautiful, but how it looks is beside the point.

For my dinner wish, I want to pay attention. I currently robot my way through this meal, failing to notice when I'm full, and just keep munching like a human roomba. This month, before I eat dinner, I'll stop to eat 12 leaves of any kind of leafy plant, like spinach, butter lettuce, parsley, or endive. I'll count the leaves and eat them one by one, like a chewing meditation. When I'm done, I will shout "12 leaves!" and high-five my daughter. I'll keep you posted on what happens.

BJ Fogg's book "Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything" gave me an idea for my second wish. In his book, he writes that our brains can learn to repeat a small activity that is coupled with another habit, plus a little reward.

This is called habit stacking, and I'm going to give it a try by attaching a new habit, performing a modest task in my kitchen, with another habit I already have, running. Right after I get back from my run I'll go directly into my kitchen for that small task. In this way, I hope my food life will evolve, little by little. It will be cleaner, simpler, quieter and richer, which will leave more room for me. I may make some delicious things, and learn skills, but mostly I hope to be more awake.

I've compiled a list of small kitchen tasks that take less than 15 minutes to do. Here are just a few of them:

1.	Wash a bunch of lettuce
2.	Clean the cords from a few appliances
3.	Wipe down all of the counters
4.	Season a cast-iron pan
5.	Make a proper omelette
6.	Clean one crisper drawer
7.	Freshen the microwave
8.	Lemon the drain
9.	Make DIY kitchen spray
10.	Straighten silverware drawer
11.	Alphabetize the spices
12.	Inventory one refrigerator shelf
13.	Make vinaigrette
14.	Freeze banana bites
15.	Hard boil one dozen eggs

I'll be trying out activities from this collection of bite-size kitchen projects. Maybe a habit will form. I hope that something in this list supports what you wish for, as well. They might make cooking, shopping, eating more serene, more fun, prettier, or simpler. In this way, let's begin the year. We're good, glad to be here, and ready for a steady stream of tiny happiness.

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