You can’t outrun a bad diet, but you can sure outspend your budget by frequenting restaurants. After a successful Year of Fitness, the next obvious step towards a healthier lifestyle is to control my eating habits. That means learning to love, or at least accept, cooking at home. 2026 will be the Year of the Kitchen.
This coalesced in mid-November while Erin’s uncle was visiting, and he was watching a Jamie Oliver cooking show one evening. Between not having seen any cooking shows in years, and Jamie’s general good nature and excitement about fresh and fairly simple cooking, I was captivated. I love watching supremely competent people work in their field, and Jamie has that ineffable ability of an expert who truly loves sharing what they do to make you feel capable of approaching his level. Although it was ten at night, I wanted to hop into the kitchen and try roasting a whole chicken. Or cook monk fish in grape leaves. Or pluck fresh grape tomatoes from the garden we don’t have. I wrote Year of the Kitchen in my notes, and it’s remained as the only sensible theme choice for this year.
I’ve already made strides in the way that any new hobbyist does: I bought stuff. Each year, I accumulate rewards from my health insurance for doing what I ought to do. Tracking steps on my Garmin, getting a flu shot, participating in digital health coaching, seeing a PCP. In 2022, I used some of that money to get into fountain pens. This year, I earned even more and bought us a nice set of stainless steel mixing bowls with lids, a Lodge cast iron double-sided grill pan (griddle and searing!) for the gas stove, and two Jamie Oliver cookbooks focused on simple, repeatable meals using a consistent stock of ingredients.
Don’t get the wrong impression: Erin and I cook. We’re actually pretty decent cooks for the meals we care about, have a growing set of recipes we can whip up on short notice, and like exploring new cuisines. But we let life get in the way too often and fail to strike a healthy balance between ambition and pragmatism, novelty and consistency. We’ll begin each week with a stocked fridge and a clear plan for dinners, but then someone’s workday will run long, we’ll be invited to go out with folks, or we just aren’t feeling it. A missed meal quickly snowballs into several days of inconsistency, and our freezer gains yet another chicken breast that would have otherwise gone bad.
Like with most themes, Year of the Kitchen is about stepping in the right direction. I’m not making a hard pivot and setting a moratorium on eating out or nixing any prefab frozen meals. The positive action is cooking by default, building flexibility into our meal plans, and being firmer about internalized laziness. I’ll find a better selection of simple meals, tasty and ambitious meals, and boxed or frozen meals to have in a pinch. I also need to create a consistent plan for breakfast and lunch that aligns with my workout schedule, since I can get out of whack after a long run that lasts most of my allotted lunchtime.
I’m confident in this theme’s success. We love our kitchen and both feel motivated to use the space, our nice cookware, and fun gadgets and appliances. We have a dishwasher that washes our dishes. There’s a big center island with great counter space. Really, we have everything we could want to make cooking a big part of our life, but adoring the act of cooking and becoming amateur chefs isn’t the goal. If we get there, that’s awesome. But just being an adult in the kitchen more often than not is all I’m aiming for.
That speaks to a meta-theme these last two years of handling insecurity and immaturity. Fitness and food have been two banes of my young adult life. I cared, but not quite enough. So many people I know seem to figure it out naturally with little thought or stress. They eat what they should, exercise regularly, and don’t make a big deal about it. I’ve had to fight myself a bit harder. While I’m a bit late to the party by taking these seriously at just shy of thirty years old, it’s much better than ignoring it forever.