I Am Bored of My Own Cooking

Tonight we are making a skillet of sausage, apples and onions, and the apples are not a fancy touch, they are the cheapest thing in the pan.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cut four sausages into thick pieces and brown them in a wide pan over medium high heat until they are cooked all the way through with no pink in the middle, about eight minutes. Take them out. In the same fat, cook two sliced onions for eight minutes with salt until they soften and start to color. Add two apples, cored and cut into thick slices, skin on, and cook them for five minutes until they take on some color and start to give. Put the sausage back, add a splash of vinegar and a small spoon of mustard, and let everything come together for two minutes. Black pepper. Bread or potatoes on the side. It feeds four, it costs a few dollars, and the sweet and the sharp together is the whole reason to make it.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the sausage.

It is that nobody has complained and you are bored anyway.

That is the part that has been hard to say. There is no criticism to point at. Your family eats what you make and says nice things and asks for particular dishes. By every external measure this is working.

And you are tired of your own hands. You stand at the counter and you know exactly what is going to happen next and exactly what it will taste like, and there is no interest left in it anywhere, and you feel small and ungrateful for even noticing.

Because how can a person be bored of the thing that keeps everybody in the house alive.

The verse that gives permission for pleasure

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that is not usually preached and that is doing something specific.

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. (Ecclesiastes 9:7, King James Version)

Read what is being commanded. Not endurance. Not gratitude, exactly. Joy, in the eating, with a merry heart, and the reason given is that God accepts the work already.

That last clause is the hinge. The acceptance is settled before the enjoyment starts. It is not that a person must enjoy their work to have it accepted, it is that the work is accepted, therefore go and enjoy.

Which means enjoyment is not a bonus that a person earns by being sufficiently grateful. It is something a whole book of Scripture instructs people to go and take.

You are permitted to enjoy your own work, and God has never once handed somebody a task and forbidden them any pleasure in it. Ecclesiastes 9:7 makes joy an instruction and puts God's acceptance underneath it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen at six in the evening.

You have not been ungrateful for a single minute, and heaven has never once mistaken boredom for a lack of thanks. It is written that God now accepteth thy works, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the onions are softening.

Boredom is a real thing and it is not a fault

Now let me name what has happened, because it is mechanical rather than moral.

Something like fifteen thousand meals have come out of that kitchen. And a person doing anything fifteen thousand times will get bored of it, and that is not a spiritual condition, it is what a human mind does with repetition, and it happens to surgeons and pianists and everybody else who has ever been good at anything for a long time.

The reason it feels shameful here is that this particular work has love attached to it, and so being bored of the work feels like being bored of the people.

You are not tired of the people, and boredom with a set of movements has never once been coldness toward anybody. Ecclesiastes 9:7 commands joy in ordinary food and puts God's settled acceptance underneath it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a task from the household it is done for.

It is not. Those are two entirely separate things. A set of movements has gone flat. The family has not gone flat, and no evidence anywhere suggests otherwise.

Being tired of your own cooking is not a verdict on how much you love the people eating it.

You are not tired of them, and God has never once read boredom with a task as coldness toward a person. The passage instructs joy without ever demanding it as proof of anything, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a set of movements from the people they are done for.

You have been doing this well for so long that it has gone quiet, and that is what mastery feels like from the inside. Ecclesiastes 9 is written by somebody who had done everything and found most of it flat, and the Holy Spirit is the one who meets a person there rather than correcting them for it.

Change one thing because you feel like it

Here is the practical part, and the reason is what matters rather than the change.

Put the apples in.

Not because they are better, and not because the family needs variety, and not because anything was wrong. Put them in because you want to see what happens, which is a reason nobody has offered you in about fifteen thousand meals.

That is the whole prescription. One thing in the pan, chosen for interest rather than for need, once or twice a week.

Because boredom does not lift through effort, and it does not lift through gratitude, and it certainly does not lift through cooking something more elaborate for people who did not ask for it. It lifts through curiosity, and curiosity is small, and it starts with wondering what an apple does in a pan of sausage.

You are allowed a reason that is only yours, and God has never once required a person's interest to serve somebody else before it counted. Ecclesiastes 9:7 sends a person off to enjoy the ordinary things without attaching a purpose to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes two sliced apples into the beginning of something coming back.