Six Places to Find Inspiration When You Don’t Know What to Eat for Dinner
The longing for food is real. There are nights when I am hungry, but nothing in my pantry inspires me. I’ll spend an hour on Grubhub until all the places are closed and end up eating popcorn for dinner. Not ideal, but there are several ways around this. Whatever the reason you’re facing culinary troubles, here are six ways to deal with the “nothing good sounds good” blues.
The New York Times newsletter “What to cook this week”
There are countless recipe sites on the Internet, but very few I consider reliable. The New York Times is one of them. Once a week they send out a newsletter called ” What to cook this week ” with very little diatribe. I’ve been surprised how often I actually want to cook what’s in the newsletter, at least enough to consider it a starting point.
As long as the site stays behind the subscription wall, you can call the subscription line to get it cheap. It’s $1.25 a week for the recipes section only, there are often discounts and you don’t need a subscription to get the newsletter.
When in doubt, trust Marta
It’s 2023, we’re on the defensive after Martha Stewart, and for good reason. She just knows shit. If you’re looking for a wider range of suggestions, check out her dinner recipes and take a look. You can break it down by season , by how much you are serving (just you, two people, family, party), how healthy you want it to be, etc. Her recipes are well documented, there are often videos, but most are important. they help me narrow down what I want.
Sometimes I know enough to decide that I want to fry something. Or that I would like to do something with chickpeas. Martha’s site will help you narrow down the possibilities enough to inspire you.
Check Boobs Tube
When my food cravings were at their peak, television saved me. Watching cooking shows made me want to cook again. I’m talking about actual cooking shows, not competitions where 20 sweaty contenders try to make 200 appetizers in the aisles of Target or on the Ferris wheel.
I immersed myself in Vivian Howard’s stories and recipes from her Somewhere in the South series and started making dumplings from all over the world. I was traveling in Italy with Stanley Tucci , and hell, pasta is starting to get attention again. French food at home inspired me to brighten up winter with thoughtful pastries and cassoulets. Watching Matty Matheson cook just about everything makes me want what he just cooked. I said what I said.
On some small level, Nailed It pissed me off so much that I started making desserts only to prove to myself that the contestants were just incredibly bad bakers. The point is, get it where you can.
Get a real cookbook
Don’t search the Internet, don’t borrow from Libby; buy or borrow a real cookbook, sit down and leaf through it. Some of the most inspiring cookbooks have been released over the last few years, full of stunning photos and incredible flavor profiles that are likely to make you want to eat.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat are as good as everyone says; Samin Nosrat is amazing and the book will inspire you. A Table for All by Gregory Gourdet introduced me to amazing new flavors and dishes, and I’ve cooked almost every recipe. Vivian Howard’s It Makes It Taste Good was exactly the starting point I needed. The vegetable soups from Deborah Madison’s kitchen really blew me away with how much soup it turned out to be.
Let the AI do all the work
After all, I had a really well stocked pantry and freezer and knew enough to just start shopping in my own home. Even if you don’t have enough stock, you can take whatever you have at home and just plug it into a lot of different sites and they’ll post something you can do with it.
This is useful because I often said that if someone dropped food at my door, no matter what it was, I would still eat it with pleasure, because I did not have to think about it. It doesn’t matter if I wanted it or not. These websites essentially do it for you.
Effin Reddit
Look, I’m not questioning the mysteries of the universe, I’m just writing about them. Do I trust a bunch of crowdsourced strangers that I should be eating? Ha. Does it work anyway? More than I would like to admit.
The answers I grudgingly found to most of life’s questions, like what kind of driver do you need to run your TV, how to make a recipe from a restaurant that closed 13 years ago, and yes, what’s for dinner, almost always end up on Reddit. Tonight’s dinner is a good place to start.
I’m not saying I’ve fully recovered from food boredom. There are still nights when I find myself looking through delivery services, desperately trying to find something I want to eat, and too many nights I get substandard Chinese takeaway food and fall asleep in a haze caused by salt and glutamate sodium. (There are worse ways.)
But I have definitely noticed that finding these inspirational sources will put food on my radar. This led me to my current obsession with radicchio salads, and there’s a gochujang pasta recipe from The Times that I’m definitely making this week. Sometimes you need not a complete recipe, but a little inspiration. Even if you don’t like what you cook, you will learn something. (You may find out that you hate an ingredient, a recipe, or a chef, but knowing what you hate is helpful.)