Cooking: Not So Much

I've made only the tiniest bit of progress on the cooking front.

I followed my daily emails from the cooking program for a couple of weeks, and actually did some cooking on a weeknight. But work has sucked up way too much mental energy and physical time and space, so my weekday evenings are not so great.  I still, mostly, go to the gym twice a week, and I'll never do more than heat up a meal on those days - not realistic to expect otherwise.  But on days without the gym, my evenings go like this:

Come home, let the dog out of jail, change my clothes, take the dog out for very short walk. Come back, feed the dog, and grab pistachios and flop on the couch with the ipad to catch up on facebook, the 'gram, twitter, and feedly, my reader (I do not look at my personal social media during the day, though I do check my personal email.)  Besides seeing that my brother is visiting his grandchildren, I also really like the current-event oriented posts and often click through to read articles suggested by friends and folks I follow. This couch-flopping will last from 20 to 90 minutes, depending on how tired I am and how interesting the social buzz is.

The pistachios take the edge off my hunger, but by the time I stand up again its getting late and I'm hungry again.  Cooking anything that involves more than one step (insert in microwave) is unimaginable.  If I had the energy to cook, we're still looking at eating closer to 8 than 7, even for a quick meal.  I strive to be in bed by 9:30 (up at 5:30) and so that's pretty late. 

I've tried to change up the routine, by eating a snack at work before leaving. Still, I want that down time when I first walk in the door.  So in my never-ending quest for that one gadget that will fix my life, I've bought an Instant Pot, a combination pressure cooker / slow cooker (and it even makes yogurt but I don't eat yogurt). The Instant Pot isn't as instant as the hype ("cook chicken in seven minutes!") because it takes up to 20 minutes for the pot to pressurize, less than 10 to cook the contents, then another 5-30 minutes to cool.  But my thinking is, maybe I can throw contents in the pot while the dog has his dinner, and then the pressure cooking happens totally unattended while I do the couch flop. We'll see - I've done it once so far.  The food was good, and chopping before flopping isn't so terrible.

I've also realized pistachios are a poor choice for multi-tasking - takes two hands (and a good thumbnail) to open them. So if my snack is just already-shelled nuts, or celery with almond butter, or small or cut-up fruit, some other one-hand to toss in my mouth then get back to chopping snack, I could munch while chopping.

I'm also trying to up the weekend cooking volume so I have good leftovers during the week.  I've discovered I need at least two different main dishes - plus at least cooked meat for my lunches - to convince myself to stick with my own food and not go buy something. 

This kind of micro-analysis of my routine, in order to try to build better habits, is clearly going to be a never ending hack-a-thon in quest of the better me.  I predict it will cyclically be followed by coasting, not expending the effort to think things through, but theory says whatever habits I have, that's what I'll revert to when tired, so if the habits are good, they will carry me through those times.