A Passionate Cook Decides to Stop ‘Eating Properly’

I loved cooking — I’d say I was fairly good at it — and I was always keen on having friends round for dinner, preparing a whole table of dishes for them myself. After I left my job, I had plenty of time on my hands. Every day I’d work out when my roommate would finish, get a soup on to simmer early and have the vegetables prepped, so that once she was home, I could fire up the wok and get a proper stir-fry going.

In my friends’ eyes, I am the model of “living a good life,” but only I know that this way of life has gradually become a burden. In contrast to those who suddenly fall in love with cooking, I decided to stop expending so much mental and physical energy on my meals and began looking for a simpler way of eating, hoping to achieve a more minimalist lifestyle.

The Grand Enterprise Called ‘Cooking’

From a young age, I loved trailing after my mum into the kitchen to lend a hand. In name only, of course — really it was just curiosity driving me to poke and prod about, knead at the dough, and snatch a stolen bite of the freshly fried meatballs. Once I was old enough for my parents to trust me with the stove, my skills leapt forward. I could slice potato into fine threads, and I learned to give a quick splash of vinegar just before taking things off the heat to lift the fragrance. What I cooked began to look the part.

Even after leaving home to work, I held onto eating properly as a kind of creed. Three meals a day — whenever circumstances allowed, I cooked them myself. The most-searched phrase on my Xiaohongshu account is ‘how to make XX.’ If I found a dish I liked out and about, my first instinct was to try recreating it at home. I wanted to do my best to eat well — healthy, delicious, and full of joy.

In truth, cooking is a huge operation. It’s not just the cooking itself — the advance shopping for ingredients, the planning of what to eat — every single part is a drain on both mind and body.

Sorting, washing, chopping, into the pan… the full sequence takes at least thirty minutes even for a seasoned, quick-handed cook. Just the sorting and washing alone takes a good while — some vegetables need peeling, others need their strings removed, leafy greens are prone to insect eggs and pesticide residue and need a thorough wash. The more particular among us even rinse the rice several times until the water runs clear, then soak it in advance in the rice cooker.

Grocery shopping is an art in itself. You can’t buy too much — vegetables lose their nutrients and texture the longer they sit. Nor can you buy too little, or you’ll find yourself with nothing to cook when the time comes. When you go shopping, you have to plan what you’ll be eating, factor in both main ingredients and supporting ones, top up on rice, oil and seasonings in a timely fashion, and round things off with fruit and drinks. I buy a week’s worth in one go. Meat and seafood go straight into the freezer; leafy greens and aubergines or courgettes get eaten first while they’re still fresh; and hardy root vegetables keep well enough to last.

Even when I shop on a fresh-food delivery platform, I often spend well over half an hour just selecting items — browsing new products, working out best-before dates… By the time I’m done, it’s as though I’ve been through a proper fight: dizzy and drained, I collapse onto the sofa.

◉Shopping for groceries on a fresh food e-commerce platform is also a physical task. Image source: Dingdong Maicai

Once the groceries are in, large quantities of meat need to be portioned and frozen. Vegetables and fruit have different storage requirements. Bread and pastry also need to be sealed and frozen. Only when everything is put away, the fridge door is shut, and the bags are cleared up is the shopping task truly complete.

I work from home, so my schedule is flexible, and I’m reasonably skilled in the kitchen – my day-to-day menu is mostly set. Even so, just getting three meals a day sorted is enough to give me a headache.

Not everyone is in a position to cook. In a first-tier city, renting a bedroom with no kitchen is entirely normal, and coming home after a commute, washed out, is just part of daily life. Ordering takeout or eating out seems like the easier route – no cooking, no washing up. But finding a place that is actually tasty, healthy, and hygienic is far from straightforward. Ordering takeout is a form of labour too. At mealtimes you have to filter through options and make decisions, all while bearing the risk that the food will be poor or that it will make you unwell.

A younger friend who recently started working and I joke that we eat nothing but “guochao takeout” day in, day out. The same Chinese national-trend-style packaging, heavy-on-the-oil-and-salt fried chicken, stir-fries, and rice bowls, accompanied by a packet of black plastic cutlery – this is the most common thing among working people’s takeout. Nothing wrong with it per se, just a risk of an upset stomach.

◉ A delivery bag, a black plastic spoon, and a rice bowl heavy on oil and salt — that’s the full guochao takeout formula. Image source: Xiaohongshu user Gahong

Many young people don’t attach as much importance to eating, so they’ve drastically cut down the time spent on meals. Some skip breakfast, others skip lunch, and when things get busy, some manage with just one meal a day. In a fast-paced big city, time outside work is precious — reserved for socialising, entertainment, or self-improvement. Time carved out for cooking and eating just doesn’t seem a good use of it.

When “eating properly” becomes a burden

For a long time I held firmly to the belief that cooking was a measure of quality of life — at the very least, it showed you were taking care of yourself. Keeping up the habit of cooking for myself after starting work felt, in part, like reclaiming control over my life. I was spending time on cooking that others might have devoted to work or leisure, even though it yielded no obvious benefit or return.

The turning point came in the second half of last year. After leaving my job, I had all this time on my hands, and every day I racked my brains over what to eat. For a while, I’d work out when my flatmate would get home from work, start a soup simmering and prep the vegetables, then once she arrived, throw everything in the wok for a big stir-fry. It felt rather like being a housewife.

Once my time became free, my feelings about cooking shifted. Three meals a day, rain or shine, felt like a pet that needed feeding on schedule — consuming a great deal of time and energy. With two of us eating together, there was no room for half-hearted or makeshift meals. This was both an external nudge and an invisible pressure. Over time, I worried I was falling into the narrative of “washing my hands to make soup” — standing over a pot while waiting for someone to come home.

My flatmate noticed the problem before I did. Worried that cooking every day would weigh on me, she more than once suggested we keep things simple. But I felt that now that I had the time, I all the more ought to make each meal something to be proud of.

At the end of last year, I went back to my hometown from Shanghai and stayed for nearly a month. With no job to anchor my days, I had more time alone with my mum, and I became more conscious of the labour she put into three meals a day.

My mum is a full-time housewife. She gets up at six every morning to prepare breakfast, does the housework, then heads out to the market. After lunch she takes a short rest, then starts on dinner. The kitchen is enclosed — she’s essentially alone in there, and from outside you can only make out a shifting figure. There’s a small stool in the kitchen that she keeps there year-round; while cooking, she’ll sit for a while, keeping an eye on the heat while doing a bit of something else with her hands. Every day she goes out to the market, comparing freshness and prices at different stalls, but she always goes to the same butcher’s, simply because their meat is fresher and doesn’t release so much water when stir-fried. She spends nearly five hours a day preparing three meals for the whole family, washing up and tidying after, and if you factor in the lulls and rest periods, cooking alone could easily fill an eight-hour workday.

In the past couple of years, whenever I’ve gone home, I’ve made a point of being in the kitchen more often, hoping to give her more time to herself. I’ve also suggested that meals could be simpler — cook a batch and freeze it, prepare separate portions, or just throw everything in one pot and make do with half-hearted meals. Unsurprisingly, to her this sounds like “it’s not proper — Chinese people should eat freshly made food.” Spending half a day setting a full table for the family is, in her mind, the most natural thing in the world.

I grew up watching her busy herself in the kitchen, and absorbed with it the idea that “eating properly should be the most normal thing in life, and preparing three meals a day should be just as normal.” I suppose it’s possible that because our two generations have had different life experiences, our philosophies of living differ too, and I shouldn’t be held hostage by ideas that were never questioned.

◉Foodthink takes turns cooking. To prepare lunch for everyone, each meal takes one colleague several hours of working time. Image source: Foodthink

My ‘Sloppy Meals’ Experiment

After leaving home and moving back to Shanghai, I finally worked out three things: first, I genuinely don’t want to keep spending so much time on food; second, I need to find a simple way to eat; third, just start moving and figure it out as I go.

There are plenty of time-saving options: food delivery, eating out, pre-made meals, or even buying washed-and-cut quick-cook meals that come with seasoning included, ready in five minutes. Each of these is convenient in its own way but has its drawbacks, and none can serve as a long-term, stable solution. What they all share is that they outsource part of the work. Following this logic, I could also shift most of the labour forward in time, so that every meal is both quick and convenient yet still healthy and delicious.

As for the method, I decided to make my own pre-prepared meals using steamed dishes. Steamed dishes can accommodate a wide range of ingredients. During prep, you only need to season them, then pop them straight into the freezer. When it’s time to eat, simply steam them through — incredibly convenient.

Drawing on steamed dish recipes I found online, I’ve distilled a formula: seasoned meat paired with root vegetables and mushrooms — think taro steamed with beef, spare ribs steamed with pumpkin, and the much-loved sauna chicken. The key is to choose vegetables that can be frozen and will still hold their shape after steaming. If you like bolder flavours, look to the tradition of Liuyang steamed dishes from Hunan, where cured meats and chopped chilli come into play — cured pork steamed with dried radish, for instance.

To make these pre-prepared meals properly, I also had to invest in containers. The ideal one needs to be freezer-friendly and go straight onto the heat. Glass is too heavy, plastic can’t go straight into the steamer — it turns brittle after freezing, cracks easily, and is a nightmare to clean. Round bowls and plates don’t store well either. Stainless steel tins turned out to be the best option.

I started with taro steamed with beef and garlic vermicelli with prawns. For the beef, I cut and seasoned the meat, then lined the bottom of the tin with taro and layered the beef on top. The prawn version was simpler: a bed of soaked and drained vermicelli at the bottom, frozen prawns arranged on top, then a layer of chopped chilli sauce and minced garlic. Once everything was in place, I snapped on the lid and pushed the tin deep into the freezer.

By lunch the next day, I was itching to see if it had worked. I pulled the frosted-over stainless steel tin from the freezer, popped the lid off, set it in the steamer, and gave the timer ten minutes. Every few minutes I couldn’t resist lifting the lid and poking at the contents with the tips of my chopsticks. Ten minutes in, the prawns and vermicelli had taken on that pale, cooked look, but the beef and taro were still solidly frozen — a rock-hard block that my chopsticks simply couldn’t pierce. It took until the taro was completely soft and tender, breaking apart at the faintest touch of chopsticks, at exactly twenty minutes.

After a few rounds of trial and error, I’d worked out roughly how long different dishes need in the steamer. If you’re not chasing that perfectly tender, just-off-the-heat quality, twenty minutes is the number to go with. Once the tin is in the steamer, you can leave the kitchen entirely. Twenty minutes later, the timer goes off, you come back, lift the lid, and dig in. No need to watch the heat, no splattering oil smoke — the only thing to keep an eye on is making sure there’s enough water in the pot so it doesn’t boil dry.

◉Pre-made steamed dishes aren’t exactly a feast, but they win on convenience. The choice of ingredients and seasoning matters a great deal: the shrimp in the left image are seasoned with olive vegetable, while the shrimp with glass noodles in the right image use chopped chilli and minced garlic. Photo: Jiaxin

Compared with stir-frying, steamed dishes have an enormous margin for error. Even if you overcook them, the food won’t turn out dry and tough, and the seasoning doesn’t need to be precise—close enough is close enough. They’re also very forgiving for beginners. No matter how clumsy your knife work or technique, twenty minutes in the steamer and the food will go from raw to cooked, all in its own steam.

Beef and chicken thigh, once tossed with seasoning and starch, come out silky and tender after steaming. The vegetables underneath have absorbed the meat’s flavour, so they don’t taste flat either. I also like adding chopped red chilli sauce to steamed prawns on glass noodles, or Puning bean paste, fermented black beans, or shredded ginger paste to the chicken and beef. Thanks to these flavours, steamed dishes aren’t as monotonous as you might expect, and the taste has more depth to it.

The one drawback is that this method is ill-suited to leafy greens. Their high water content means that freezing ruptures the cell walls, and once thawed, they simply turn to mush. Freezing greens typically requires a laborious process: blanching first, then shocking in cold water, drying off, and portioning for the freezer.Online grocery platforms do sell frozen greens, but at a premium — not worth it when you can just prepare them fresh. Unless used as a filling, greens are simply not an ideal ingredient for steamed dishes.

In any case, I’d achieved my goal. After a few hours of intense work, my brain didn’t want to make any more decisions, I had very little energy left, and all I wanted was a hot meal to refuel and then a proper rest. So I could just open the fridge, pull out two containers of food and a box of rice, drop them in the steamer, and then wait for a good meal to appear. And the benefits don’t stop there. Eating straight from the stainless steel containers means my flatmate gets to wash two fewer plates, and we both escape the kitchen entirely.

Eating properly has no standard answer

A few days later, a new problem emerged.

Steamed dishes are efficient, of course, but the texture after reheating simply can’t match a freshly stir-fried plate. That ‘Chinese stomach’ of mine, raised by my mum’s cooking since childhood, started to protest after a week of steamed dishes, sending ceaseless signals to my brain: Stir-fry! Stir-fry! Stir-fry!

I didn’t want to force myself to fight this instinct, nor did I think it meant my homemade pre-prepared meals had failed. On weekends, or whenever we were both home, I’d still go all out—cooking a proper meal, eagerly searching recipes on Xiaohongshu, heading to the supermarket for ingredients, trimming and washing vegetables at the sink, and frying, stir-frying, stewing, and simmering at the stove.

On the surface, nothing looks any different from before, but I am no longer cooking to display a ‘well-curated life,’ nor to wash my hands and make broth for someone, and I no longer treat my three daily meals as a measure of my own worth. Now I drift between several modes — when I crave the fresh, smoky flavour of a hot wok, I take the time to savour the pleasure of cooking; when my energy has run dry, I simply pop the pre-made steamed dishes into the steamer.

Beyond that, I’ve been exploring more ten-minute meal options. In my spare time, I braise a large piece of beef shin, slice it, portion it out, and freeze it. I freeze the braising liquid into small cubes too. When the mood strikes, I boil a pot of water, toss in some noodles, the sliced meat, and the dark brown, rock-hard frozen braising cubes. Before long, the frozen liquid begins to melt in the boiling water, turning the clear broth a rich, dark amber, and the aroma rises with it. From bringing the water to the boil to a bowl of beef noodles settling in my stomach — ten minutes flat.

◉Braising in an electric pressure cooker or rice cooker is equally hassle-free. Rinse the blood from two beef shanks, drop them straight into the pot with ginger, scallions and braising spices (a ready-made braising pack from the shop will do; add a few dried chillies if you want some heat) and enough water to cover the meat. The electric pressure cooker has them well braised in about 45 minutes. Leave them in the pot overnight, and they’ll be perfect to slice up and eat the next day. Photo: Jiaxin

I’ve also fallen for Guizhou red sour soup. Add a measure of it to water, toss in whatever you have to hand – frozen prawns, white mushrooms, leafy greens, tofu skin, glass noodles – whatever takes your fancy. In just over ten minutes, a bowl of hot, sour, and bracingly fresh sour soup mala tang is ready to serve. When the summer heat makes me reluctant to turn on the stove, cold-tossed vegetables and noodles are both good options.

At last, I’ve stopped agonising over what counts as the ‘standard’ way to eat well. Whether it’s a twenty-minute steamed pre-prepared dish, a red sour soup that’s ready in ten minutes, or takeout that suits my dietary needs — as long as it fills me up, provides adequate nutrition, and spares me a little mental and physical energy so I don’t end the day completely drained, that’s the most considerate care I can offer myself.

◉Summer leaves both my appetite and my kitchen feeling uninspired, so I make some simple tossed noodles. The image on the left is Korean cold noodles with julienned cucumber and sliced ham sausage; the one on the right is homemade tomato-sauce tossed knife-cut noodles seasoned with fresh basil. Photo: Jiaxin

– This is Foodthink’s 836th original article –

Foodthink

Author

Jiaxin

Freelance writer who loves cooking, eating, and the endless pursuit of a better way of living. I’m interested in the social history of food and the practical details of daily life. You’re welcome to come over for a meal!

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