Crip up the Kitchen Author Jules Sherred Wants Your Kitchen to Be More Accessible

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In the United States and Canada alone, approximately 20% of adults live with some form of disability, yet prescriptions are rarely written with people with disabilities in mind. The prescription reader is supposed to have hands that can chop, slice, and grab without pain or discomfort; that they can lift heavy pots and pans, bend down to open the oven door, and navigate their own kitchen with ease. This is rarely the reality when cooking with one or more disabilities, which is why Jules Sherred wrote Crip Up the Kitchen: Tools, Tips, and Recipes for the Disabled Cook .

It’s a comprehensive, thoughtful cookbook that makes good use of the Instant Pot and deep fryer, while championing frozen vegetables and infamous “universal gadgets” like the garlic press – all things that professional chefs, food writers and home cooking enthusiasts have scoffed at. . for being unnecessary, redundant, or lazy, but can be invaluable to people with disabilities.

I called Sherred to talk about why this book is needed, how to make your kitchen a little less austere, and how to cook nutritious and delicious meals no matter your ability level.

It’s nice to see a cookbook that makes me say, “I’ve never seen this before.” This is what we were missing.

My suggestion was basically “I’m going to change the way cookbooks are written” and it was like “Who are you to change a cookbook? They are made the same way from 60 to 100 years.” But [I said], “I know what needs to be done, trust me .” And someone let me do it.

In the book, you say that the kitchen is the worst room in the house if you are disabled. Why is this?

Unlike other rooms where adding accessibility and mobility aids is relatively inexpensive, kitchen accessibility can cost upwards of $100,000, depending on your type of disability. Who has $100,000 to do a quick or complete kitchen renovation – either reduce the height of the kitchen countertop or widen the aisle between the countertop and appliances? For example, I can’t open my refrigerator when I’m using a wheelchair because there isn’t enough space.

Many of your recipes include an Instant Pot or deep fryer. What do you like about these devices?

Instant Pot? Because you put everything into it, set it up and forgot it. There are some recipes that require several cooking steps, but usually you reset everything, set and forget, and all your energy goes into the prep part. You don’t have to worry about remembering to stir things up. No babysitter.

An air fryer requires little maintenance, just like anything you bake needs a little more attention. But still, there is a certainty that if you forget about it due to brain fog or some other cognitive dysfunction, you will not have to worry about your house burning down. The worst thing that can happen is that your food will be overcooked.

With an air fryer, you can bake like a person in a wheelchair, because people in a wheelchair cannot use the oven, so with the oven on your work surface or on the table, you can bake and fry the way you want again. safe.

One of the things you point out is that many Instant Pot recipes are not optimized for the Instant Pot. What makes a good Instant Pot recipe?

You start with the minimum required amount of liquid. This is the first place where people get it wrong; they do one on one. “Well, the recipe on the stove says I need six cups of water, so I’m going to pour six cups of water into the instant pot,” not knowing that anything that isn’t starch will add a cup of water to the recipe and dilute it. And everyone’s like, “These recipes are all so tasteless,” and yes, because they’re overly diluted. If it is too concentrated, then at the end you can add water. Very simple.

The next thing they digest is this. Let’s say they want to make tomato sauce and they’re like, “Well, that’s about 40 minutes to cook tomatoes on the stove. So I will have to do this for 40 minutes in the Instant Pot. Again, you cook under pressure and physics changes the rules. The rule is to find the ingredient that takes the longest to cook, and no matter how long it takes to cook, that’s the amount of time you cook [the dish].

So it’s really all about knowing the right amount of liquid and cooking time so it doesn’t turn into porridge (unless you need it to be porridge due to arthritis or some other chewing-related disability) .

You have an extensive, well-thought-out list of appliance and tool recommendations in your book. Could you tell me about a few that you would like to know about earlier?

French rock. For a year and a half I couldn’t use my thumbs at all until I had surgery on both hands, and even now I still have trouble grasping, and the traditional rolling pin is an instrument of torture. The French rolling pin makes this very easy. You don’t even have to use your hands; you just use your wrists.

Instead, you can use a pasta roller—whether it’s a mixer or a hand crank—for things like pie crusts, roti, and other flatbreads, because even rolling out was sometimes too much effort. You can be very precise about the thickness. For a recipe that says “three millimeters thick”, simply set the pasta roller to that thickness.

[Also using] the multi-egg cutter to cut soft things other than eggs, such as porcini mushrooms, strawberries, and cherry tomatoes.

Another one I wish I knew about earlier is the immersion blender with attachments. Just to have a really lightweight food processor [so] you don’t have to use your hands. You can use it with one hand by grabbing the food processor in the crook of your arm and holding it against your body while attaching the immersion blender. If you have mobility issues like tilting, you don’t need to use heavier equipment that can be difficult to control. And there is almost no storage space. With nozzles, it’s like five devices in one, and it costs, relatively speaking, inexpensive.

I think there is a tendency to dismiss appliances and tools that seem to be either simplifications or universal tasks, such as the famous garlic slander.

Yes, or even buy already chopped garlic – “How dare you be so lazy? You are not a real chef. No! They are literally life-saving tools. Everyone needs to eat. And one of the reasons I wrote this book was because everyone was telling me I needed an Instant Pot, and then in their next sentence, they were telling me everything they hated about it. And I’m like, “Why would I buy this if you hate it so much? I don’t understand.”

Then I saw someone with a disability use it and they briefly talked about how it helped them in the kitchen and now I see. And no one mentions benefits for the disabled. Everything that is useful for a person with a disability causes dissatisfaction, and we are called lazy for using it.

Now there are so many things I can really enjoy because I can cook sitting down. I can’t stand by the stove. Five minutes is the []outer limit that I can stand or walk before I have to use a wheelchair. Being able to feed yourself again is important for a variety of reasons.

We all need food that is appropriate for our culture, that we are connected to, that we enjoy eating, that reminds us of happy memories. And people do not understand this or ignore this importance.

Get Jules tools:

Can you briefly explain the spoon system and how you use it for cooking?

It’s based on the spoon theory and the spoon theory is about how healthy people who don’t have problems with fatigue have full cups of energy they can expend throughout the day and don’t have to think about how they use that energy. . , and they don’t need time to replenish it. If they feel tired, they can sit down for half an hour and they will get a second wind and be able to walk again.

For those of us with fatigue as part of our disability, we have spoonfuls of energy a day. And these spoons fluctuate a lot, and it takes much longer to refill this spoon. I created a system where you create a chart of what you can do based on how many spoons you have. And it takes time to make this chart fit for you. The diagram in the book is the one I created while working on the book. It’s a starting point that people can look at and add their own stuff.

I check my body at the beginning of the work day, find out how many spoons I have, [and] choose what I’m going to do. I come back after lunch. If I have more scoops to spend, I add a few more tasks because I only need to spend one scoop and I’m done. And the goal is to have one spoonful left at the end of the day so you can enjoy life and not wallow on the couch or need a bed because you’re exhausted and have a headache.

You only cook a few times a month. How to switch from weekly to monthly?

It takes a little more planning ahead, only you have to choose eight recipes and figure out the main ingredients for those recipes. Once I have that, I do a two-week prep such as chopping a bag of onions, resulting in about eight cups of onions, and freezing them. I cut the onion into quarters, then put them in a food processor. I don’t sit and cut a sack of onions with my hands. My hands can’t take it. Same with green peppers and everything else. This is all cut into quarters and it will all go into the food processor.

It’s a matter of having commonly used ingredients on hand or in the freezer, a well-stocked pantry of non-perishable foods, and asking, “Today I’m going to make 16 servings of chicken meal,” and then I press them, or if people don’t have that option, they can freeze them. So I always have 42 to 46 meals where I’m really low on energy and then it depletes. But if I have a day when I feel really good, then I already have the ingredients, so I’m going to make another big batch and it won’t take long to restock.

In your book, you say, “Don’t let diet culture shame you into using frozen vegetables,” because, as you explain, frozen vegetables can actually be more nutritious.

There is always some food lobby involved in these things, but there is a common misconception that frozen vegetables are not as nutritious and are full of salt. But it is not. They may have added salt to frozen vegetables a long time ago, but then they realized that adding salt to frozen vegetables actually makes them raw. They are now quickly blanched and quickly frozen within hours of picking. From the moment something is plucked, it begins to die and lose nutrients. The food you get in the fresh food section, some of it has been there for a week. In the frozen food section, [these items] were frozen less than 24 hours after collection. So they’re really fresh, they’re just frozen.

Most people cannot tell the difference. You’re not some chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant. You don’t have to worry about [taste]. You need to worry about feeding yourself and making sure you eat nutrient-dense foods.

I don’t mean to be a snob, but it’s the snobbish culture that caused this, right? Ignore the judgments, please. That’s why I swear in my cookbook because it’s bullshit. I’m here to help you undo this message and just say, “Today I fed myself. I did a great job.”

What would you like healthy people to consider when talking about cooking or inviting people with disabilities into your home to share a meal?

Everything that a disabled person does requires a lot of effort. One of the things that really upsets me about healthy people and their recipes is [they say], “Oh, I have this recipe. It’s very simple. It takes me 15 minutes to make. Even “30 minute” meal sets take me an hour and a half because it takes me a lot more effort to cook something due to mobility issues. Nothing is easy.

Coming to dinner is exhausting. You need to leave room for the disabled person to tire, or maybe instead of inviting him to your house for dinner, you say: “I want to cook something for you and bring it to your house.” You still spend time with the disabled person, and he does not need to do extra work for your pleasure.

Is there a hack you recently discovered that you think everyone should know?

In the cookbook, I explain how I turned the eating area in the kitchen into a prep area. When I photographed the book and did the finishing touches, I had to move it all to my dining room, and now my dining room is my kitchen. Not everyone has a canteen, but if you do have a canteen, put the instant pot, deep fryer, and all [the rest] in there and take a bucket to collect all the dirty dishes so that you can take them to the kitchen at the end. , and have someone in your home do it. If you have a partner who can do it, that’s their job.

Use a dining table and a side table or sideboard for storage. For wheelchair users, this is easier than trying to navigate tight corners in the kitchen. My kitchen space has the tech space needed for code, but I still can’t move around corners easily when I have to use a wheelchair.

Another thing you can do is use an Instant Pot in your living room. Use your coffee table for cooking and cooking. Just because it’s a living room doesn’t mean you can’t cook in it. If you don’t have space in the kitchen or you don’t have a dining area, then you have a living room.

Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?

I hope people enjoy the book. Yes, it is for people with disabilities, but like everything about people with disabilities, it benefits everyone. For anyone with little time, busy schedules, families with small children, this will help you too, because it’s all about saving time and energy.

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