Quarterly Cookbooks: A “Life Hack” for Turbulent Times
Q1 2025: Half Baked Harvest Super Simple
I usually hate the idea of “life hacks.” I associate them with productivity culture and motivational speaker vibes, which annoy me. The term evokes “crush your day” podcasts, cold showers at 5 am, and other unpleasantries. I don’t want to “hack” my life, I want to enjoy it.
But life is hard, and the last few months have been especially so, and if I’m being honest, I need all the help I can get.
During stressful work/school weeks, I can barely manage to get food on the table for dinner. Around 5 or 6 pm, my husband and I will ask each other the age-old question, “What should we do for dinner tonight?” At that point, if we haven’t planned out a few meals and grocery shopped, it’s a challenge to come up with anything. Unless one of us runs to the store, we’re likely to either scrounge something not-so-great out of the fridge, or walk to Chipotle for burritos. Again.1
The week is smoother and less stressful if we plan out a few meals in advance and have groceries in the house.
And yet… meal planning can be a struggle.
Why is meal planning so hard for me? For one thing, it’s time-consuming. Thinking of ideas, making a grocery list, going to the store, putting food away… This process can easily take a couple of hours, start to finish. I enjoy these tasks sometimes, when I have plenty of time and am in the mood to cook. But when I’m tired and busy, it just feels like one more tedious chore to do.
Mostly, though, I find meal planning to be overwhelming. I am fortunate to have easy access to plentiful food and live in a place where a lot of food variety is available to me. But that fortune leads to “The Paradox of Choice,” a concept from psychologist Barry Schwartz. There are so many meals I could cook - from the cookbooks I own and the “millions, if not billions” (according to Google’s response to the question) of recipes available online - that choosing between all the options gives me decision fatigue. Meal planning would be simpler if I just had two or three possible meal options to choose from, instead of millions/billions.
I do have some “go to” meals I cook all the time, but I get bored with them. And trying new recipes is fun, but takes more effort. And, anyway, how am I supposed to know what I’ll feel like cooking and eating for dinner Tuesday evening when I sit down to meal plan on Saturday? The whole process gets so overwhelming, sometimes I stare at a blank grocery list or scroll through recipes and can’t think of a single thing I want to cook.
And so, despite my feelings about life hacks, this year I came up with a new idea for a meal-planning life hack: Quarterly Cookbooks!
What Is This Quarterly Cookbook Hack?
Each quarter this year, I’m picking a cookbook and cooking some recipes from it. That’s pretty much the gist of it.
What ISN’T Quarterly Cookbooks? My goal isn’t to cook every recipe in the cookbook, like some people do. (I wish I had that kind of determination and stamina!) It also isn’t to cook from only one cookbook for three months. I’ll still rely on my favorite “go to” meals, cook from other sources whenever I feel like it, and (let’s be realistic) resort to Chipotle sometimes. There’s no pressure here, no perfectionism.
So what IS it then? It’s just something I’m trying make life easier for myself, while also keeping things interesting in the kitchen. I’m diving into one cookbook each quarter, and using it as my primary source for meal planning and cooking. That’s it! I’ll get the fun of trying new recipes without the billion-recipe overwhelm. Mostly this is about giving me focus, and keeping myself contained in a world of chaos and overabundance.
Why quarterly? A quarter. Doesn’t it just sound so official, so boringly middle-age, so business-y? As if I have a quarterly goal and I’m going to file a report or something? Three months is a good amount of time to cook out of a cookbook. A single month goes by awfully fast for something like this (especially since I’ll likely only cook a few recipes per week, max). Any longer than a quarter and I can guarantee I’ll be bored with it. Also, I gravitate toward certain types of cooking based on the season. Soup in the fall, grilling in the summer, that type of thing. This way, I can choose my cookbooks according to my seasonal moods and other whims. Plus, three months is about how long I can keep a cookbook from my local library2 (assuming it’s not in high demand, and I can renew it a few times).
Who Cares? (Cooking on the Deck of the Titanic)
Right about now, you might be thinking, Debbie, trying recipes out of a cookbook isn’t exactly a new or interesting idea. Or you might be asking, who cares? There are big problems in the world. Is this really worth writing/reading a whole Substack post about? Or you might not struggle with meal planning the way I do and wonder what my problem is.
All fair points.
But I tried a “Quarterly Cookbook” in Q1 (read about it below), and it has brought me a little bit of stability and joy, something we could all use right now. So why not share it?
I came up with this idea in early February, and I don’t think the timing was a coincidence.
In times of stress, projects like this give me something to focus on. We have a U.S. president who is tossing plates and flipping furniture, and the chaos is being felt - personally and globally. But I can make dinner tonight. I can pick out a recipe, cook it, and eat a meal with my family.
Projects like this give me something to focus on. We have a U.S. president who is tossing plates and flipping furniture, and the chaos is being felt - personally and globally. But I can make dinner tonight. I can pick out a recipe, cook it, and eat a meal with my family.
Five years ago, I cooked quite a lot during the early, home-bound months of Covid. I joined the sourdough trend. I started subscribing to New York Times Cooking. And, for a couple of months, I kept an almost-daily pandemic journal, which included notes about the meals I cooked. Flipping through that journal now, I see a brief note about the elaborate cheesecake from Dori Greenspan my daughters and I made for my husband’s April, 2020 birthday. This note brings back visceral memories as strong as the memories of everyone in face masks, empty streets, and the parking lot preschool graduation ceremony.
Cooking gave me a sense of stability through the stress of the pandemic. And now the world feels like a hot mess, yet again, and I feel a similar desire to hunker down and focus on the things I can control.
Cooking a meal feels a little bit like Wallace Henry Hartley and his band of musicians playing violin on the deck of the Titanic as it sank. It’s a way of keeping calm and maintaining a small sense of normalcy as everything collapses around us.
I often think of a scene from The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. It’s historical fiction about two sisters in occupied France during World War II. Food was scarce and, in the scene, they find a potato and make a simple soup. That detail from the book has stuck with me for years. The ordinarily simple act of making potato soup was an act of wartime survival.
In a Substack essay on “Archetypes of the Resistance,” Jungian therapist
writes about The Cook archetype. “Without physical and spiritual nourishment, we all whither. The Cook is a person in the community at any scale, in a refugee camp, a restaurant, a church basement, or a home, providing food to sustain bodies and beings.”Am I seeking a false sense of control by focusing on cookbooks? Is this some sort of emotional avoidance on my part? Probably.
But I believe these are the moments we need to tap into our humanity the most. We need to cook, create art, dance, sing, and support each other in our communities. We must keep going, we must take care of our children, we must nourish ourselves. We must find joy and do life-affirming things when we can. Through these activities, we keep putting one foot in front of the other, day after day.
My Q1 2025 Cookbook Choice: Half Baked Harvest Super Simple by Thieghan Gerard
I chose my first cookbook for this project, Half Baked Harvest Super Simple by Tieghan Gerard, in large part because I already owned a copy - which my mom gave me as a Christmas gift - and I had had cooked a couple of recipes from it in January. (Remember, I didn’t think of doing this until early February.) The recipes I had already made were good, and I wanted to try more. I used sticky notes to mark the recipes I wanted to try, and dove in.
Like me, the cookbook’s author, Tieghan Gerard, lives in Colorado. She’s up in Summit County, a ski area in the mountains. Incidentally, one of her brothers is an Olympic snowboarder. Tieghan has a huge following online, and her cookbooks, including this one, are incredibly popular and highly rated. She’s also sparked some controversy. Unbeknownst to me at the start of this project, Tieghan Gerard is a controversial figure. (See this NY Times article about her if you want to learn more about that.)
Here’s where I get business-y and file my quarterly report. Overall, this project was a success! I tried some new recipes, and while a couple were “meh,” none were bad and most were quite good. There were a few I’ve already made multiple times and will likely make again. Three of the “keepers” were Sesame-Crusted Salmon with Honey-Soy Dressing, Breaded Lemon Chicken with Burst Cherry Tomatoes, and Wine-Braised Chicken with Artichokes and Orzo.
My overall review of the cookbook is mostly positive, but mixed. It has some relatively easy and delicious recipes that were worth making and my whole family devoured. The photos are gorgeous. But I do agree with some of the criticisms I’ve read about the author. A few of her recipes from other cultures are definitely not authentic, and I had to override some of her instructions which even I, an amateur home cook, knew did not make sense. And many of the recipes are a little too heavy on coconut milk and cheese for my taste. Otherwise, I do imagine myself returning to Half Baked Harvest Super Simple for future cooking.
As I file my quarterly report, I find myself worried that my husband will read this (thanks for following my Substack, honey!) and expose me as a fraud. Honestly, I haven’t been cooking that much lately, and I only cooked maybe a dozen recipes from the cookbook in Q1. That’s not very impressive!
Then again, I’m not doing this project to impress anyone, and that’s definitely more than I would have cooked out of this cookbook otherwise. Like I said, no pressure here, no perfectionism.
Next Up in Q2
I’ve already chosen and started cooking from my Q2 cookbook, Easy Weeknight Dinners from that treasure-trove of great recipes, New York Times Cooking.
Anyone out there want to join me? You can use the same cookbook or pick your own. What do you plan to cook this quarter? How are you making it through these turbulent times? Keep me posted on how it goes, and stay tuned for my next Quarterly Cookbook report in July!
I’m a clinical psychologist, co-host of Psychologists Off the Clock, and author of the books ACT for Burnout and ACT Daily Journal. You can find me online at drdebbiesorensen.com.
I am aware of how privileged this sounds. I am incredibly fortunate to have access to so much food!
Did you know that libraries are a great source of cookbooks? There are thousands you can borrow and try out!
I’m a clinical psychologist, co-host of Psychologists Off the Clock, and author of the books ACT for Burnout and ACT Daily Journal. You can find me online at drdebbiesorensen.com.
Great idea, Debbie. I think I will try it.