I never really worked in kitchens after that, but I stayed in food service for over a decade, and I always relished a chance to get my hands on something behind the pass. I remember a busy night at a curry restaurant where, in order to deliver the shrimp dishes that my table had ordered, I first had to learn how to devein the bastards. (This was the same job where I once walked in on the head chef shooting up in the basement—like, full needle-in-arm situation—so it was a real "anything might happen!" kind of atmosphere.) Most of my jobs were front-of-house: I was a hostess and then a server, both in Stratford and Toronto. Restaurant work was often fun. I was physically active and getting my steps in. I ate a lot of really good food. I got drunk with many of my coworkers. I was once someone's missed connection on Craigslist! I read Anthony Bourdain and went to Chez Panisse on California trips. I could talk cogently about food. I considered myself a foodie and a restaurant person. There was a sense of in-the-trenches us-versus-everybody camaraderie during a busy shift that was not present in, say, non-profit housing development.
However, after more than ten years of slinging plates, I wanted what I conceived of as a "real job," even though I was making terrific money waiting tables, and my income from doing so would be unmatched for the next fifteen years. And, ironically, I wanted to do more in the kitchen, so I turned to home cooking.
In 2017, during the early toddler years, I set a goal that I would learn how to make my take-out top five: pad thai, pizza, burritos, sushi, and poke bowls. It was something to do, a process that filled up my days with trips to the library for cookbooks, grocery store runs for ingredients, and a husband that took an interest in eating the final product. It was also a process that let me use parts of my brain were otherwise understimulated in my life, wrapped up as I was in the baby years and my work life. This was a fun project, free from anyone's expectations but my own. Plus, I was spending a lot of money on takeout; my theory was that I could port those skills home and save some cash.
Some of those meals were easier than others. Pad Thai, once you've source the tamarind, is not an overly complicated process. Sushi and poke bowls require more chopping and specialty ingredients, but you can fake this in a small town in a "who cares, I'm the one who's eating it" kind of way (crab stick, spicy tuna salad, or smoked salmon are all decent substitutions for fresh raw fish). Pizza is probably the trickiest of them all, because my own personal oven dial doesn't go to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, and there's no way to fake a charred and chewy crust in an Amana, but I did the best I could. And I think, overall, I got good at those dishes, and other ones. I was never fluent in French or Italian styles, but I could feed myself and anyone else who came along.
But then the pandemic happened, and I was in the kitchen all day long. Breakfast and lunch and dinner and snacks. Making kombucha, making salsa from my pandemic-garden tomatoes, making cookies and muffins, passing out cheese plates and roasting chickens and monitoring the toaster oven for chicken-nugget doneness. My one big outing most weeks was to No Frills, which, true to its name, was extremely unfrilled. Even if someone else cooked the meal, I planned it and usually shopped for it. Navigating the realities of parenting a picky eater meant I was often prepping at least two offerings at each meal, one of which was a white carb. This is an autobahn to absolutely not giving a fuck about food in any form. When I'm making two meals and one of them is always mac and cheese? It killed my soul.
I also felt disconnected by the tools of culinary innovation. When I was younger and had more time—not to mention access to international grocery stores—I would often try cooking new cuisines; now, I had no bandwidth to dive deep on Neapolitan cuisine or izakaya. At No Frills, the wildest thing is, like, a turkey pepperette. As much as I can adapt, improvise, and overcome, I often simply do not want to.
Now, in 2025, I've lost my cooking mojo. My cookbooks have gotten dusty, my meal rotation has become a spiral, and I'm not thinking about food and cooking the way I did, say, five years ago. A few of my most faithful hobbies feel like this, actually: I did a lot of knitting in the pandemic, and now the idea of casting on a new project almost grosses me out. I have newer pastimes that bring me a lot of joy, like making zines or little sewing projects. And, honestly, I also spent a lot of time on my phone, because in my house, that's where the adults live. When I'm phone-zoned, it's hard to want to leave it for the sake of, like, playing with clay. Much to my detriment.
Ironically, I still love to eat, but I feel entirely unmotivated to cook new foods, or even try new restaurant meals. I seek comfort, and a certain thoughtlessness. I do not want to pay attention to what I'm eating; I just want to have eaten something good. Is this an effect of getting older? I've eaten widely across many cuisines, and a lot of it ends up being same-same in the long run. I am constantly looking for a new flavour—maybe ube? or chinotto? or dandelion?—because I feel like that might kick me into some new gear around all this. Or it might not! It's hard to say.
My kiddo is going to be gone for five of the nine upcoming summer weeks, and as much as I will miss them, I will not miss packing school lunches or cajoling at dinner time. I may find that, with that time and energy back in my own focus, I can gin up the oomph to get curious again. Or I might just stock my kitchen with easy meals and live off Cobb salad, gyoza, and jap chae again. I don't know. Having the foodie part of me go dormant is weird.
I think this speaks to a larger question in my life: who am I when my hobbies change? After defining myself as a "food person" for literally decades, what does it mean to let that label go? Is this a permanent shift? Would I feel excited if I had a receptive audience—a new partner who might applaud my efforts—or would a different feeling emerge? One of my most interesting first-love memories is spending so much time together that we would eventually bump up against mealtime, and I would cook, and it was the first time I was really cooking for someone in order to tell them who I was. (It was also fascinating, in retrospect, to realize that if I didn't cook a meal for us both, he would just...not eat. This should have been a clue that we were far too different to last.) Right now, I don't need to tell stories about myself to other people; I don't know if I can tell them to myself, either. I don't know what I want to say.
At the end of the day, I have eaten. Today, I ate small heart-shaped spelt cookies and cherries and cheese. I ate a bagel with cucumbers. I ate some cold Wendy's french fries. I ate a roast beef wrap. I ate chicken nuggets. I ate a peanut butter square. I thought about making a chicken pot pie. I read a cookbook. I thought about sweet potatoes and vegepate. I thought about what stories I wanted to tell about my nourishment, my body, my care for others, my care for me. I am groping my way along the buffet, and I am sometimes fed.
