Why cooking orchids?

It is so disappointing when you cook a meal and it isn't even good. So much effort goes into shopping, storing, preparing, cooking, washing up and then cleaning. If you don't have much money then mistakes mean important spare cash down the drain. And if you are ill you may have used up your whole energy for a day or more.

I didn't choose Home Economics at school for my GCSEs which is in part because I didn't have an affinity for cooking; I actually studied Resistant Materials (please don't assume I'm LGBTQ+, thank you). I would bake cookies and muffins at home but that was about it; my dad needed a good meal at the end of the working day and my brothers & I ate a lot growing up, so the family kitchen wasn't a place for beginners. So, ironically, because my mum was cooking & housekeeping all the time, learning to cook at home wasn't really on the cards for me. Above all though, I had thought it was normal to pick up cooking skills by yourself as an adult.

Cooking was shockingly difficult for me when I dropped out of university more than 10 years ago with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. There is something fundamentally different about cooking with an illness or as a carer. There are factors that most people don't even think need to be considered such as how to name recipes by the ingredients you need to remember when shopping or meals that are made exclusively on the hob or in the oven. How noisy the kitchen is or how flexible the timings, or ingredients, are can really make a difference to whether you can actually complete the recipe. I spent a lot of time in libraries and bookshops but I couldn't find cookbooks that resonated and only later have I been able to articulate the priorities I was looking for.

I was also trying to tune in to which foods made me feel better or worse. My schoolfriend Emily gave me a book (sort of encyclopaedia) about the nutrients in different vegetables. As obvious as that might seem now it wasn't to me at the time - I was caught up with avoiding all the "bad" ingredients such as sugar, salt, fat, preservatives etc. It reminded me that there were lots of vegetables I had never cooked and just gave me more of a positive view of food. I still have to remind myself to build a healthy diet up from vegetables.

Add in to the mix that I wanted to be vegan and low-waste; I suddenly had autonomy over my meal choices and was accountable for my decisions when I was buying all the ingredients and sorting all of the rubbish. Everything that made sense to me as a child didn't really anymore- I've gained some clarity now and I'm even able to share cooking with my mum who has health problems too.

I have started sharing what I've learned about learning to cook almost from scratch with a health problem, and share my continued progress even if it's basic. I tried to capture how much pressure there can be with cooking [I get the impression it's easier for some people] as though it's like trying to cook an orchid for the first time. I didn't want to use ME/CFS or fatigue in my blog name because it's negative but also I think I'm recovering and hope to recover fully but I will still be figuring this out then.