Guide #4: A Simple, Peaceful Dinner

I've been cooking much more simply these days, and I love how the food is just as delicious. This guide explains a method I use all the time.

This is another bean-focused guide since it’s a staple of my cooking! Last week I posted the framework I use to make a layered bean stew. I stand by it, but lately I’ve been a bit too busy to follow my own advice. In reality, I’ve shifted toward a much simpler way of making dinner.

This was born out of my focus lately on minimizing the stress of cooking. We moved into an apartment with a much smaller and awkwardly shaped kitchen. Counter space is limited and the anxiety a dish pile gives me has increased significantly, so I’m on a break from cooking anything that creates more of a mess than necessary. This isn’t coming from a place of laziness, but from a desire for cooking to be peaceful.

You might say that’s a tricky place to be as an aspiring food creator, but I see it as a positive. This new constraint has sparked an unexpected wave of creativity. It’s pointed me toward a niche I’m actually really excited about: the challenge of making delicious food in a small, kinda shitty kitchen.

This has led me to some perspective shifts I’m excited about.

Mainly, I’ve realized on an even deeper level that the key to making cooking easy—without sacrificing that special, grounding feeling you want from homemade food—is trusting ingredients. Simple, basic preparations are arguably even more magical than the complicated ones when you start with high quality inputs.

So the only reason I see left to cook anything complicated is that the challenge is fun. Some days it is fun for me. In my new kitchen, those days come less often.

I know there are other people out there who want to make delicious food in their less-than-ideal kitchens, but find most of the “15-minute shortcut meal” sort of content depressingly productivity-coded. Home cooks with practical constraints who still want cooking to make them feel something beyond the practical. That’s an audience I’d love to connect with.

Let’s bond over how good ingredients make simple cooking feel more like a peaceful and intentional practice that honors flavors created by nature, and less like time optimization.

For today, here’s a brothy bean method that uses only one pot, doesn’t require any dicing, and with the right ingredients, tastes so good it becomes hard to justify complicating things.